Those detector vans were a hoax. I don’t have a TV licence because I don’t fit any of the criteria for requiring one. Screw taking it out of my tax instead.
Germany solved that issue by making owning any device capable of receiving internet broadcasts part of the eligibility criteria. By that point they could just as well make it part of general tax budgets...
Germany just sends a bill to every registered resident, no matter what.
The Rundfunkbeitrag is applied per household, not based on devices, and it's up to each person to either pay the tax or justify to the Beitragsservice that they don't need to.
And of course young people are also less likely to watch TV in the first place. It's basically subsidized entertainment for the elderly, which would be fine if the funds were sourced equitably. I also don't buy that this weird totally-not-a-tax setup makes the news any more independent from the government - after all, it's still the government deciding to uphold or even increase the fees as well as allowing and supporting the enforcement.
Yeah, it's a pretty shitty system and I wish we would get rid of it. Don't have high hopes of that happening anytime soon though.
Some countries have a very interesting way to frame the requirements: "any device through which you can listen/view broadcasts produced by the national radio/television". When they stream national video/radio online it automatically qualifies every computer or smartphone or car radio as a device that makes you required to pay the tv fee
Actually they were a thing, briefly, but technology rendered them obsolete as quickly as they appeared (better shielding to avoid interference etc) - but they remained a deterrent for quite a while
