Because their support comes from different sources, commercial and noncommercial TV stations live in separate broadcasting universes.

When a for-profit station needs a top-line boost, it calls the local car dealership. When the public station needs money, it may call the local congressman.

But, according to John Lawson, the two breeds of broadcasters have much in common.

John Lawson is president of the Association of Public Television Stations, a Washington trade group that represents 361 noncommercial TV stations.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Editor Harry A. Jessell, Lawson says noncommercial broadcasters face some of the same challenges as their commercial counterparts—working through the DTV transition, finding ways of monetizing DTV, coping with the FCC's arbitrary indecency enforcement and securing cable and satellite carriage.

And like commercial broadcasters, Lawson is enthusiastic about in-band mobile video and other opportunities created by the move to digital.

“We do have the opportunity to bring back over the air,” he says. “It's perceived as a dinosaur right now, but it doesn't have to be.”

An edited transcript follows:

What's at the top of your agenda?

We're shifting our focus from securing funding for a digital infrastructure to funding for digital content. That's really the big story for us.

We're probably not that different from the commercial broadcasters. We have raised $1.3 billion for the digital transition. We're not done yet, but generally the stations are in pretty good shape in terms of the hard date.

Now we really have to find a way to create the digital content to really leverage that infrastructure.

So you're going to Congress now and saying we want supplemental funding to develop new channels for digital?

There is a line item of about $30 million a year that Congress created at our request in 2001. That has been an extremely important funding source for digital equipment.

We've asked Congress, for FY2008, to extend that line item and allow CPB to begin repurposing those funds for the creation of digital content, specifically for something we're calling the American Archive.

What's that?

The American Archive is a project that would preserve and make accessible to the American public the incredible library of video and audio content that exists at public stations across the country.

Would that be a broadband thing?

It will definitely be broadband. It might be VOD, it could be broadcast, it will probably be all of the above.

What about DTV multicasting channels?

That's happening too, but we have not gone to Congress and asked for specific funding for linear channels.

You said your stations are in “good shape” with respect to the DTV transition. Yet, you just asked the FCC for more time in getting your act together.

Yes, that's true. We're consistent with the NAB in that regard. We do need some flexibility. There are some special circumstances.

What specifically do you want the FCC to give you here?

We've got stations with boarder coordination issues with Canada, and we have stations that have just recently received their final channel assignments and need time to hire contractors to move antennas and things like that.

We are not asking for a delay in switching off analog. We are asking, in some cases, for flexibility in getting the digital signal to full strength. We're actually asking, in some cases, that stations be able to turn off analog early.

You have struck cable carriage deals—with the ACA earlier this month and the NCTA a couple of years ago. And, as I understand it, they guarantee carriage of your main channels as well as the multicast channels.

Right now, under these agreements, cable is obligated to carry four programming streams from one public station in each market, but, when the analog transmissions ends, they have to carry four digital programming streams from every public station in every market. We think of it as HD plus three other channels.

The NCTA deal runs till 2015 and then we have a two-year renewal window. The ACA deal is also 10 years from today—until 2017.

And part of the deal is that public television agreed to cease any advocacy around multicast must carry.

That's a pretty sweet deal. I think some commercial broadcasters would go for it.

It is. Never in our history have we had anything approaching this kind of shelf space before.

What about the satellite TV operators?

We've had some real serious discussions with DirecTV. They are configured differently than cable. We're having to be more creative about getting our multiple signals into the subscribers' homes, but we believe DirecTV is negotiating in good faith. I think we're going to come to some resolution this fall or decide we can't and have to appeal | More …