NONCOMMERCIAL TV NOT SO DIFFERENT

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 to the FCC and Congress.

What about Echostar?

We’re much less further along in our talks with Echostar.

So that’s a little bit of a problem.

It’s a major problem.

What about content issues? You’re grappling with indecency enforcement issues just as the commercial broadcasters are. In fact, a noncommercial TV station in San Mateo, Calif.—KCSM—was fined last year for the language in a PBS documentary [The Blues: Godfathers and Sons]. Are you engaged on that?

Yes. We and PBS and a group of stations including the one that was fined have appealed that at the FCC. Nothing has happened since.

We are a little bit different from the commercial broadcasters in that, in most cases, we’re locally controlled. Our argument is that accountability in terms of language or violence or anything else really belongs at the local level.

I always thought that there was such a thing as a prevailing community standard for indecency. There’s not what we have at the FCC. It’s a national standard established by a majority of the five political appointees and we think that’s pretty dangerous.

With regard to KCSM, these old blues musicians are speaking reality—shit and fuck—and we get fined whereas somehow Saving Private Ryan, a big Hollywood production with scripted lines in it and paid actors, is allowed to do it. So we’re a little bit confused.

You could see yourself taking this case to court?

Oh, yes. We could definitely see that happening. The PBS and APTS boards have not authorized us to move forward with a judicial appeal, but that certainly is on the table.

What about this TV violence? Do you think it’s got legs?

I just don’t see how. The constitutional questions seem to be pretty sharp there. As a parent and a citizen, I’m not really happy with the state of television, but government doesn’t regulate content well. These proposals to limit violence are on very shaky constitutional grounds from a practical standpoint. How would the government really police that even if it were constitutional?

But the question is, do you think Congress will move forward with legislation?

We take it seriously. This is not a partisan issue. I think the whole question of indecency definitely has legs. Whether violence does too, I don’t know. I’m not going to be too quick to dismiss it.

Did the broadcasters invite you to join them in their ad hoc coalition to oppose TV violence regulation?

We are frequently approached to join with the commercial broadcasters on issues like this. We have declined so far on the violence issue.

Is that a money thing?

Partially. But we’re focused right now on the KCSM case. This is the first time ever that a public television station has been fined and we have Ken Burns’s big production, The War, coming this fall. It has some language issues. For example, Burns tells the story of “fubar” and “snafu” and it’s hard to do that without using the F-word.

So what’s going to happen with War? Are they going to clean it up or not?

I think PBS is still weighing its options. You know, one option would be to feed two versions to the stations and let them decide. The other would be to feed it just as Ken Burns produced it and let everybody take their chances.

How has Congress and the CPB been treating you in general? It seems to me that every year Bush wants to cut your funding.

Every year he has proposed major cuts to our funding. His budget that was released in February was the seventh year in a row that he recommended drastic cuts for noncommercial television and radio. We have withstood those cuts all these years.

The real crunch came in 2005 when the House Appropriations Subcommittee voted with very little warning and no public debate to cut our funding by 45%.

We asked our stations to go on the air and inform their communities about these proposed cuts. That led to an amendment on the floor of the House that we won 2 to 1. We got almost 40% of the Republicans to vote with all the Democrats and that money was restored.

About once every 10 years—it’s like cicadas—somebody tries to cut our funding and we have to do a major grassroots mobilization to fight it. We keep winning because the American public supports the idea of noncommercial public service media.

I take it you would do better with a Democrat in the White House?

Well, it would certainly be nice to have any president who’s not trying to defund us. [The first] President Bush certainly treated public television well.

The situation in Congress is that the Democrats are supportive, but they’ve inherited a treasury that gives them very little room to grow discretionary funding. So we have to compete with a lot of other worthy causes. We did see the first increase in the regular CPB appropriation in four years in the House and Senate appropriations bills.

This year?

Because of forward funding, this would actually be for FY2010. We saw our funding increase from $400 million to $420 million.

But for the most part your basic federal contribution has been flat?

Yes, I mean the good news is our funding was stable. The bad news is our funding was stable,

But we have grown funding in some other areas. As I said, we actually got Congress to provide new funding—$30 million a year—for the digital transition. And it provided additional funding of $120 million over four years to rebuild the PBS satellite interconnection system.

And, going forward, you hope to use $30 million for the archiving project?

Yes, and then we convinced Congress to provide money of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the digital transition of public stations. It looks like that’s been renewed for 2008.

So you’ve got all kinds of spigots.

We’ve also got money in the Department of Commerce through our long-standing equipment program at NTIA and then we’re receiving money directly from the Department of Homeland Security for this whole digital EAS project.

And that obligates you to do what?

It obligates our stations to use some of our digital bandwidth as needed for a presidential alert and warning message. This is an upgrade to the still existing, still used Emergency Alert System from the Cold War days.

In the testing we did with DHS here in the Washington area, we datacast messages that were received and retransmitted by other broadcasters, by cable, by cell companies, by paging companies and by satellite radio. So we’re actually building the backbone of a 21st century alert and warning system.

Are you satisfied with the current rules governing underwriting announcements on the stations?

Well, there was a bit of a push toward to commercialism in public television that has pretty much run its course.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to compete with anyone on 30-second spots, and 30-second spots don’t seem to be the best business model around anymore anyway.

So I think there’s a growing understanding that public television has to remain noncommercial. The only thing that PBS did, about four years ago, was loosens its own restrictions to allow 30-second underwriting spots now for major funders.

I understand that you are part of the Open Mobile Video Coalition that’s trying to come up with an in-band mobile video service for broadcasting.

Yes, we are part of it. The [commercial] stations voted to allow one exception to its rule that members be station groups and that’s APTS. So APTS is a member of the coalition and we have a seat on the board.

And what do you think the potential of in-band mobile is?

It’s huge. The American DTV standard was designed to deliver high-definition to fixed receivers, but because of the work of two groups—LG/Harris and Samsung/Rohde and Schwarz—they really seem to have figured out how to provide a reliable signal to moving devices. To me, this has the greatest financial upside for broadcasters of any development in years.

We’ve been talking about a commercial launch of some service in February 2009 and we’ve got to figure out if it’s advertising supported or subscription or pay per use. Are we going to work with the incumbent carriers like Verizon and Cingular or should we do something different? You know, there’s a lot of business questions that have to be answered, but the technology breakthrough seems to be real.

So, there is still life in broadcasting.

Public television couldn’t do this alone, but we have to rethink broadcasting. We have to reposition it as wireless TV, make it cool again. I’m excited by the breakthrough in mobile video. I’m not saying that it’s going to happen, but I think that we do have the opportunity to bring back over the air. It’s perceived as a dinosaur right now, but it doesn’t have to be.

DTV is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the broadcasting industry to reinvent itself.