In Germany you have to pay a license to watch TV, currently a whopping 17.50 € per month. Much of this goes to funding two public service television networks, ARD (6,000 million € in 2014) and ZDF (2,000 million) (see Rundfunkbeitrag). The positive side of this, especially if you're outside Germany and don't need to pay the fees, is that they generate lots of content and make it available online.

In addition to these institutions, there are similar institutions in Switzerland (http://www.srf.ch/) and Austria (http://tvthek.orf.at/), though the choice is less than in Germany.

You have a whole choice of TV shows available online. Some are geographically restricted, but most are available in good quality anywhere in the world. Of course, it’s online content, so the web interfaces are just as bad as anywhere else in the world, but some of the content is good, and much of it is “HDTV”, by which they invariably mean 720p. Here are some URLs:

• ARD Mediathek

• ZDF Mediathek

• ZDF Neo

• SRF

• Schweizer Film

• ORF

• MediathekDirekt is a web site that displays programme details. I haven't investigated much because there are many false negatives, and the interface is particularly painful.

The following sites also offer content, but I have not been able to get anything useful from them. Possibly they're restricted to access from Germany, but they're too polite to say so:

• Sat1

• Sat1 Gold

• Pro7 MAXX

• TLC

In my experience the bandwidth is not adequate for 720p TV programmes, so it makes more sense to download the images and look at them locally. There are two possibilities here:

• MediathekView, a program for managing programmes, viewing online, and downloading. It suffers from many false negatives, and by design it only shows programmes from the last month, even though the network may keep programmes for years.

• youtube-dl. As the name suggests, it's mainly intended to download videos from YouTube, but it also works on most „Mediathek“ pages. If the page is trying to play a programme, youtube-dl will probably be able to download it if you pass it the URL of the page.

  youtube-dl has a plethora of options. One that you may want to use is --all-subs, which downloads the subtitle file as well if one exists.