My suggestion that no one could produce high-quality television in the small Swiss market with advertising funding alone - not even market leader SRG in German-speaking Switzerland - fell on deaf ears. journalistic competition. Christoph Blocher often praised my entrepreneurial courage, but I received no real support from him or his side.
And today everything is supposed to be different. Now they want to tie down the SRG in order to give the private broadcasters some breathing room, as they say. This is nothing but utter nonsense. The "window asia rcs data of opportunity" has long since closed. The places in the sun are taken. Swiss regional stations have no real "upside", and this would remain the case even with a castrated SRG. And the domestic TV entertainment companies will never be able to offer a competitive offer with which they could take off with advertising revenue alone. On the contrary, in an increasingly fragmented market they will have to do everything they can to avoid losing market share.
And that's why I followed the parliamentary debate on "No Billag" with horror. The opinions expressed were mainly lobbyists and ideologues without any basic knowledge. At best, it was bar-room chatter about programs that people detest. A more honest conclusion would have been: politics has failed in this area for decades because it treated the issue first with disinterest and then with blinkers. And the shock therapy presented by politicians today all have the potential to damage the deadlock even further. The foreign stations, which have secured an outstanding market share of over sixty percent, would be rubbing their hands together.