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Europeans typically pay about the equivalent of a modern day 19" color TV per year per TV in their household for the right to have and watch that TV.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!
This post is completely incorrect, in almost every detail!
1. This applies only in the UK AFAIK, and certainly does not apply across Europe.
2. The license fee as payable for an entire household. In my house we have 5 televisions, and one license.
3. The fee covers the reception of public and commercial broadcast television. Merely owning a TV set does NOT make you liable for a license fee.
The one element of truth in this may be the price - we pay £116/year for a license. That may cover the cost of a cheap TV. However UK citizens in general do not feel that this is particularly bad value for money. While it may be expensive on a per-channel basis, the quality of the channels is very high, and there are many additional services provided by the BBC, such as the excellent bbc.co.uk, the UK's most visited website IIRC.
For anyone wanting to know more about the subject, try these sources of real facts:
TV Licensing
BBCi, The UK's #1 most visited website
and to balance the debate:
BBC Resistance - the campaign to abolish the TV License
and for a laugh:
19" Televisions for under £116

The BBC is a government subsidized quasi-monopoly. Using the BBC as a good example when it comes to media consolidation is abolsutely stupid, since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.

The BBC is not funded by the government - it is funded by a fee levied on all owners of televisions. This fee is collected by the BBC themselves via a separate organisation (see About TV Licensing). The BBC is given this power by a Royal Charter that is renegotiated every 10 years or so. The current charter expires in 2006 (see About the BBC).

The point of all of this is that the BBC has full editorial control over its output.

Using the BBC as an example of what should not happen in America is specious at best. The BBC is a very different beast to the commercial media in the UK. The UK has strong laws governing the amount of a particular media that can be controlled by one company and the amount of cross-media ownership (similar rules govern the amount of media control that the BBC is allowed to have). This has resulted in the UK having probably the most diverse and healthy media in the world.

But hey, I live in the UK. What do I care if you guys throw away your independance.

[Side note: the BBC is the only media organisation in the UK that exists solely to produce content. Remember every time you look at an advert that the commercial media's job is not to deliver programmes to your eyes but to deliver your eyes to their advertisers.]

" I don't know if there is anybody living in the UK reading this, but I believe there to be a quirk in television license rules. Specifically, devices that are not powered by mains (e.g. by battery, even if they are charged from mains -- so long as you don't watch and charge at the same time, I guess) are exempt from the requirement of a television license."

Unfortunately not true. From
the tv licensing website :

(This is in the 'Do I need a licence?' -> 'students' section)

"Your parents' licence will not cover you away from home. (Televisions powered solely by their own internal batteries being the only exception.)"

graspee

What if we had a similar tax on TVs and PCs, but now you'd be allowed to legally download and/or record anything you wanted? Let's see: 98% of US households have at least one TV, so let's conservatively estimate that there are 200 million of them, and let's not even count how many PCs there are. So that would be about $3 billion per month or $36 billion a year. In 2002, the music industry sold about $13 billion of CDs while the movie industry sold about $20 billion of DVDs (and only sold $9 billion worth of theater tickets, by the way). Well, $36 is greater than $13+$20, so I'd say we have a deal!

I wonder, can it be revoked ? Like if you don't watch the right shows ? Or for 'irresponsible viewing' :-)

Seriously though, I can not believe that the people over there willingly pay this. It's like if the US govt forced all cable subscribers to pay for CNN. Insane.

Just one more reason I am glad to be an American.

The government controls nothing, you have a seperate licencing agency that collects the cash and funds the BBC (which has no adverts, not on their site, radio, tv etc), it's an old fashioned system dating back to the early radio days they did the same thing for TV when it was introduced in the 30's, remember the BBC were the first broadcaster in the world long before commercial TV was ever envisioned.

Having a seperate agency, means the BBC do not have to go to a politically motivable Tresury and beg for cash... "Yes, we'll give you £1 in funding this year because you critised our party". It's an old system but it works, and if it ain't broke...