Andy Warhol would have loved it. From next month, anyone can have their 15 minutes of fame on television; all you need is €2,000 and to be dead.
German satellite broadcaster Etos TV hopes to move reality television to the next stage with the world's first bereavement channel.
"It's not Death TV as some people have claimed," said Etos TV founder Wolf Tilmann Schneider.
"Over 800,000 people die in Germany every year but the death notices in the paper say nothing about them. We want to change that by working with the relatives and the undertakers. The regular media completely ignores this topic."
Etos TV will be based on three programming pillars. The first pillar, and the most personal, will be short film obituaries about the recently deceased.
Mr Schneider's business partners, the German association of undertakers, will gather picture and video material from relatives and help write texts for voice-overs. The station will broadcast the film for a fee of €2,000.
Another programming strand will feature reportage about the world's most beautiful graveyards.
Finally, the station will broadcast advice and discussion programmes covering issues it thinks will be of interest to its target over-50s audience: keeping mobile in later years, organ donation and coping with bereavement. The station will broadcast for three hours daily over the Astra satellite from next month.
Etos TV hopes to expand across Europe, making death a regular visitor to living rooms alongside rolling news, teleshopping and sport.
"We Germans are in denial about death, we ghettoise it into old people's homes and hospitals," said Mr Schneider.
"But our target audience is huge and, thanks to the demographic shifts, constantly growing."
Germany is an ageing society: over two million people are in residential care, a figure that will rise to three million by the end of the decade.
Moreover, by 2020 one-third of the German population will be pensioners.
For years Germans have been testing the taboos surrounding death.
Controversial anatomist Gunther von Hagens garnered the nickname Doctor Death for patenting a method of preserving corpses and sending the results around the world in a travelling show.
He made headlines in Britain in 2002 after performing a public autopsy that was broadcast on television.
Three years ago, German company Grabwerk patented the DIY gravestone, complete with 30-day money-back guarantee.