In Italy it has been merged into electricity bills. I kid you not. And of course, the state broadcaster (RAI) is still chock-full of ads on all its channels. This is because it's not a media organisation as much as a cash-machine for aides and cronies of the government du-jour, with each channel literally allocated informally to each major party. You can imagine the average production quality.
Same for RTS in Serbia, worse even because not only do we HAVE to pay the TV license via power bill, or get sued and have power cut off (I kid you not, because of the TV license fee!) (happened to me), RTS also has 8 commercial channels that are funded from the public's money, which are only available on select cable networks.
It's RTS 1, RTS 2, RTS 3, RTS HD (which is redundant since the 3 channels are already in Full HD), and then RTS 24/7, RTS Drama, RTS Archive, RTS Music, RTS Life, RTS Kids, RTS Music 2, RTS VOD and RTS SVOD, RTS [something I can't translate] (all names are translated from Serbian).
The TV service is the only one with HD terrestrial broadcasting, and yet it's production quality is absolute garbage (I mean literally, the video quality is absolutely terrible, I'm not even talking about the topics they deal with).
Basically, a money sink and waste of time. People who have SBB (United Group) watch N1 (CNN affiliate) in Full HD (with 30 Mbps bitrate, compared to 4 Mbps for RTS 1 HD).
People who don't have SBB cable, are stuck with the low level garbage channels from our state broadcaster.
the only way of that happening is if they happen to observe you being naughty (i.e. live TV through the window when they call), or you admit to being naughty when they ask their questions
as someone who hasn't watched broadcast TV in years (or iplayer): I'm not worried
I think there’s talk of moving to a household fee here too. Oddly, making it universal seems to be more acceptable than a consumption tax. On one hand, I can see the plus sides - there’s a lot more ways to consume national broadcasters now, and it seems strange that I should pay to receive the national broadcaster on my TV, but if I scrapped the TV and watched it on my laptop, I wouldn’t (I know the UK complicates that further than we do).
On the hand, it feels unintuitive that there’s now no way to opt out. But I’m not sure how we delineate universal taxes (eg, my taxes pay for schools but I don’t use them) vs consumption taxes (I don’t pay road tax because I don’t drive). We still ultimately need to pay for them somehow - I don’t drive, but I still depend on roads.
IIRC (and this was dear to my heart in the UK as a non-motor-vehicle-driving taxpayer), road tax isn't a thing. There's vehicle excise duty, but that's not earmarked for roads (since 1937, according to https://ipayroadtax.com/no-such-thing-as-road-tax/bring-back...).
So rest assured that if you pay tax in the UK, you pay for roads along with other infrastructure and services.
And now for something completely different... I recall being told, by a man who knocked on my door in a college residence, that the van had detected my television. I had no television set. He asked to come in and look. I declined and he went away. Either enforcement by deception, or a creep using a pretext to get into womens' college rooms. Either way, bad!
I do miss the BBC website without ads and BBC iPlayer though. We had a television in later years (and a license).
But you're right, it is present in multiple countries, I think Germany and France just turned it into a household fee