June 25, 2007
Germany: New TV Channel Takes on Death and Dying
Starting this autumn in Germany, EosTV -- a 24-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week television channel devoted exclusively to aging, dying and mourning -- will hit the airwaves. Viewers will be served up documentaries about cemeteries, shows about changing funeral culture, and helpful tips about finding a retirement home or nursing care. Should you be looking to install a stair lift in your home, EosTV will be the place to find information about that too. Death and dying, in other words, right in your living room.
In 2006, Germany saw almost 150,000 more deaths than births, a continuation of a trend that has seen the country's population age dramatically in recent decades...
Working with the funeral home association -- which represents some 85 percent of German undertakers -- (Wolf Tilmann Schneider, the channel's founder) ...is hoping to provide families a video outlet for their mourning as well. Families can buy 30 second slots to create televised obituaries. For a €2,400 fee, the spot will be aired 10 times on the death channel and will also be provided as video on the company's Web site and those of funeral homes.
press release | Spiegel
by way of http://newsoftheweird.blogspot.com/
~Sounds more like a channel about "Aging & Burial". Greater profit margins on products marketed to people not immediately facing the great divide? Or simply more, less depressing products?
I wonder if they'll do a program on pain management?
Internet graveyards?
(I misread this as 'interstate graveyards' and then compounded the error by picturing burials in the median strips or at the autobahn's (i.e. interstates') interchanges.
[photo not with above]
Posted by Stubbornson at June 25, 2007 08:19 PM