Pay-per-view. Really.

Want to stop watching TV? Come to Norway, which has one of the lowest viewerships (and one of the highest literacy rates) in the developed world.
TV came here first with national broadcaster NRK1, which began broadcasting a couple of hours a day in black and white in Oslo in 1958 or 1959 and then expanded into the rest of the country in the sixties. The program offerings were, well, let´s call them eclectic; Inki, for instance, remembers the dubbed Czech cartoons of her youth as fondly as I do "The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show." The first for-profit channel (with -- the horror! the horror! -- advertisements), TV2, started in 1992 and offered NRK1 its first competition in thirty-plus years. A second ad-free public channel, NRK2, followed in 1995. The fourth broadcast channel, TVNorge, is a second for-profit operation but still only available via cable or satellite in some areas.
The NRKs only broadcast in the afternoon and evening and tend to specialize in news and documentaries (tonight on NRK1: part 2 of a 20-part documentary chronicle of the life aboard the coastal steamer Hurtigruten. I only wish I were kidding.) The private channels broadcast earlier and later, but not by any means 24 hours, and as for-profit entities they offer a smattering of things I recognize from home ("Grey´s Anatomy," "24") along with Australian soap operas and Danish detective series.
Given this cornucopia of viewing options, you, dear reader, might well wonder why only 80% of Norwegians even HAVE a TV. I´ll tell you why. You register your TV upon purchasing it and get to pay an annual fee (currently just over 2000 NOK, or about $325) to subsidize the NRKs´commercial-free broadcasts. I don´t understand this, since on Sunday they were showing Alfred Hitchcock´s first color film, "Rope" (1948), which can´t have cost more than a buck and a quarter for broadcast rights. There´s no way to opt out, either. I asked Inki if I could avoid the tax by sending in the "1" and "2" buttons from the remote control. Nope, apparently. Ingvild teaches sign language, and her department bought a TV (without antenna) to show sign language instructional videos. They asked if they could be exempted. No dice. Not even for a government institution for educational purposes.
Inki and I are currently without a TV since we got rid of our American one before the move. We´re waiting to buy one -- not just because of the tax, but also because the TVs that are sold here now are all flat screens $1000 and up. (I guess there´s no point in selling a $325 CRT TV if you´ve got to pay as much again in license fees each year just to own the thing.) Right now we don´t miss it so much. We´ve got lots to do, as I´ve said before, and TV is just a thief of free time. There is an old TV down in our garage, though, left by the previous tenant who never came back to pick it up. I wonder if it works....