PEG PROVIDERS ACCUSE PTV STATIONS OF EYEING CABLE ACCESS CHANNELS

PEG operators said the move by PTV stations to tap the local franchising process was their latest attempt to encroach on their space. Alliance for Community Media (ACM) Exec. Dir. Bunnie Riedel said PEG access providers had to fight a campaign in 1998 by then-PBS Pres. Ervin Duggan to discredit PEG and “make a full-fledged run” at PEG capacity. Another attempt was made in March 1999, she alleged, by the Freedom Network, a joint project of the Gannett-funded Freedom Forum and PBS station WETA-TV (Ch. 26) Washington to “grab” access channels in the Washington metropolitan area.

APTS declined to address concerns of access programmers, saying only that it provided its members with information that would assist them in achieving cable carriage of their digital TV services: “The strategy as to how to accomplish this is a local decision and the local management will make their decisions based on their understanding of the local situation and the most effective means to be successful.” APTS Pres. John Lawson told us in a recent interview that he wasn’t certain whether PTV stations could be treated on a par with PEG channels, but “my information is that it is within the purview of the local authorities to require that public stations be carried on their systems.”

Some public TV stations, especially the 2nd and 3rd in a market, that are denied carriage by cable operators, seem to be setting their sights on PEG capacity. Marilyn Lawrence, gen. mgr. of public TV station KCSM-TV San Mateo-San Francisco told us that her station’s campaign at the local level wasn’t to get carriage as a PTV station but as a substitute for a PEG channel because more than 50% of its broadcast day was devoted to college-level telecourses. And with digital broadcasting, the station proposed 24-hour multicasting of college and high school courses, she said: “That could easily be a substitute for an educational channel.” KCSM-TV, the 2nd and smaller PBS station in the San Francisco market, wasn’t considered for digital cable carriage by Comcast, which signed an independent carriage deal with KQED, the main PBS station in the market, she said.

Although Lawson said APTS wouldn’t become directly involved at the local level, its representatives have approached officials of ACM and the National Assn. of Telecom Officers & Advisors (NATOA) for assistance. APTS had said public broadcasters were facing difficulties negotiating carriage with cable operators, but “we made it clear to them that local government is not in a position to request carriage of specific channels,” NATOA Exec. Dir. Libby Beaty told us. While general needs could be addressed in a franchise renewal, LFAs can’t request specific channels, she said. NATOA wasn’t pursuing any “active requests” from APTS, nor was it engaged in any projects with public broadcasters, she said. Beaty said NATOA would take issue with attempts by public TV stations to seek carriage as a substitute for PEG channels, especially when “there has been quite a bit of push back from the cable industry with respect to the provision of PEG channel capacity.”

The subject was raised at the meeting with APTS officials, Beaty said, and “my understanding… was that was absolutely not their plan.” She said she was aware that some Cal. stations were in discussion with local govts. on getting PEG capacity, “but whether or not capacity is available I not aware.” It would be a decision purely of the local govt. whether public TV programming best met the needs of a community, she said: “But certainly, I don’t think that should ever be done to the detriment of the programming being provided by local government on its own channel.”

“They [public broadcasters] want to steal our channels,” ACM’s Riedel said. Calling public TV stations’ plans to enter the franchising process to gain cable carriage “extremely foolish,” she said they had failed in the past to sway LFAs to part with PEG channels. “Somehow or other they figured out access is sitting on all this channel capacity -- we've got about 5,000 TV channels -- and they have decided to enter the franchising process.” Saying PBS was facing “very stiff competition” from cable networks such as the History Channel, Discovery Channel and Bravo, Riedel said she didn’t blame public broadcasters for “feeling desperate,” but getting into the local cable franchising process wasn’t the solution: “You need to go back to Congress and get a remedy [for carriage], not from the local community.” ACM was willing to help public broadcasters find a remedy on Capitol Hill by, among other things, writing letters to members of Congress, she said, but “we are not going to have them interfering in the franchising process.”

Besides, Riedel said, public broadcasters wouldn’t be able to cope with the franchise renewal process in thousands of jurisdictions in the country, many of which already had been completed and wouldn’t come up for renewal again in 7-10 years: “They really need to stay out of the franchising process because they don’t know what they are doing. They have no clue.” Riedel said she believed that wouldn’t deter public TV stations from trying, but “I don’t think most communities are going to go for that because… communities don’t want a regurgitation of [News Hour with Jim] Lehrer.”

LFAs can’t require cable operators to carry PTV stations, said attorney James Horwood, who represents cities. But if an LFA wasn’t using PEG space it got from cable operators for its intended purposes, it then might be able to use it for PTV, he said. As for whether PBS programming would qualify for carriage on PEG channels, he said the Cable Act didn’t define PEG programming. There is guidance on PEG programming in legislative history, he said, which traditionally was that it was noncommercial programming, although only some states such as N.Y. and Vt. required it to be noncommercial. Otherwise, the programming is mostly what the local govt. wants it to be, he said, although there’s nothing that could prevent a cable operator and an LFA from agreeing together on putting a PTV station on a PEG channel.

One way of getting around the problem with specifying carriage of particular programmers, Horwood said, would be for franchise agreements to have a provision that cable operators would have one channel that carried some generic programming such as national sports events. That was done in the early days of cable franchising, he said, but “I don’t think they could try that with public television. Cable operators would have a pretty good First Amendment argument.” He said he wasn’t aware of any instance of an entire station’s programming on a PEG channel. It would be unusual for the manager of a PEG channel to say that it was going to put all the programming of a particular programmer on a channel because it would go against the very concept of PEG access, he said. Asked whether public broadcasters, who are classified as noncommercial educational (NCE) broadcasters by the FCC, would qualify for the educational component of PEG, Horwood said that although some of the programming being provided by public TV was educational, “public television channels as they now exist are not educational channels.”

Referring to WETA-TV’s efforts in 1999 to get PEG access in the Washington area, Horwood said public broadcasters had tried then to persuade LFAs to provide one PEG channel for programming that public broadcasters would provide. It met with a lot of resistance and “tended to go away. This is kind of a similar thing.” He said the issue didn’t rest entirely with city officials. The problem for public TV stations will be to “get both the city and the cable operator to both agree” to their request, he said: “My sense is that the cable operator would only be willing to do it if the city were willing to give up a PEG channel.”

While they provided “highly desirable” programming, public TV stations would be competing with local franchising resources for PEG access, said Ron Mallard, dir. of the Fairfax County (Va.) Dept of Telecom & Consumer Services. A former NATOA pres., he said his department hadn’t been approached by local public TV stations yet. Because Fairfax had been very successful in negotiating a “significant number” of PEG channels, “we would have more flexibility in making some of our public access capacity available to them [public TV stations] than most other franchising authorities,” he said. That wasn’t to suggest that would be the decision of the local govt., he said. Asked whether a proposal to turn over some PEG capacity to public broadcasters would meet with resistance from PEG providers, he said the only thing that LFAs were precluded from doing was programming on PEG that competed for ad dollars with cable networks.