What amazing stories I learned from you, in the Soviet Union there were never any licenses for radio and television. Yes, we had few TV channels and they were all state-owned, many programs were aimed at praising communism, but there were also educational, entertaining, cultural, educational, and educational programs. We only paid for the use of a collective antenna in apartment buildings, and in private homes we installed our own antennas. Probably, some part of the money was included in the cost of televisions and radio receivers, but if you assembled your own television or receiver, no one demanded anything from you.
Now, in the era of the Internet, everything has changed, terrestrial television has not yet died, but radio stations remain mainly only on the FM range.