Originally Posted by
Expat
Most of Europe's "traditional" TV channels are, or were until recently, state-owned. By "traditional" I mean those that were the only ones available through free aerial reception - the only ones that people had access to before cable, satellite, etc. So you had BBC1 and BBC2 in Britain, the RAI channels in Italy, ARD, ZDF and the regional networks in Germany, ORF1 and ORF2 in Austria, and so on and so forth.
All of the above channels, from the point of view of accessibility and even popularity, were the equivalent of the US's ABC, CBS and NBC. Besides, of course, the countless small regional tv networks.
That happened because European countries lacked, at the time, the market, and the private funds, with "critical mass" enough to have private TV channels. There was also a lot of socialist-ish ideology behind it. So, in Europe, the trend was for the state to start all the first TV channels.
In doing that, they were supported by taxes and told by the government to have "educational purposes", so they went more for what you call "quality".
More recently, however, the most popular TV channels in Europe tend to be precisely the private ones, and those that show precisely the kind of "low-quality" shows you described.
So, it seems that everyone's taxes are used to finance quality tv shows that only a minority really wants to see.