Many Public TV Stations Not Likely to Follow KLCS Channel Sharing Deal With KCET
A channel sharing agreement between a public TV station and an independent TV station likely won’t inform decisions at other public TV stations on whether to participate in channel sharing or the broadcast incentive auction, public TV executives and attorneys said. The memorandum of understanding between Los Angeles stations KCET and KLCS was drafted after a channel sharing pilot with KLCS and KJLA there (CD Jan 29 p4). Stations would still need to assess their own situations to determine whether channel sharing is a viable option, the observers said.
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Opportunities to engage in channel sharing may be available to public TV stations in markets where there are multiple such stations, said Todd Gray, a public broadcast attorney at Gray Miller Persh. If two public TV stations can coordinate on their programming operations without running the same programming concurrently, and both TV stations are maintaining their must-carry rights, it’s an arrangement that could make sense in some instances, he said. The Los Angeles market has four public stations, so channel sharing probably makes a lot of sense for KCET and KLCS, he said.
Participation is going to be based on local circumstances, said Dennis Haarsager, executive director at Public TV Major Market Group, which consults for top-30 market public broadcasters. Not many markets have a non-PBS station and a station with limited PBS programming, he said. It would be more surprising if a full service station in the market participated, he said. The FCC had no comment for this story.
It can be challenging for interested stations to find a suitable partner for channel sharing in their markets, Haarsager said. “I don’t think a lot of the potential partners in a market are very attractive.” Stations want to partner with other stations that have some stability, he said. KLCS is a stable entity that’s going to be around for a while, he said: It wouldn’t partner with a station “that’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy."
The Association of Public Television Stations provided information to members to help them decide what’s best for their stations and communities, said Patrick Butler, APTS president. The pilot between KLCS and KJLA attempted to demonstrate the technical capabilities for stations considering channel sharing, he said. “The number of stations that are going to be choosing channel sharing as a way of doing business going forward is still going to be a fairly small number.” APTS wanted to make sure members understand the options and what they involve, he said. “They're beginning to come to some solutions and conclusions that are right for them and right for their communities.”
Some public TV stations that previously didn’t make any decisions on whether they'd partner, sell spectrum or keep their spectrum are leaning toward staying out of the auction, some public TV executives said. WNED-TV Buffalo probably won’t participate in the reverse auction, said Joseph Puma, vice president-engineering and technology. Puma said he’s concerned about the repacking process and how the FCC is determining the coverage areas of stations that are to be protected. The FCC’s method could hinder border stations, like WNED serving a portion of Canada, from entering channel sharing agreements, he said. “If they're counting the same people in an area, it makes it virtually certain that the pattern area will be the same in Canada.” The FCC hasn’t shared its Canadian negotiations with broadcasters, he said. Nobody would take on the burden of signing channel sharing agreements by Q2 without seeing that information, he said. “Going into a channel sharing agreement potentially sacrifices future capabilities, and you aren’t going to do that lightly without having all the information you need.”
Western Reserve Public Media in Ohio will pass on the channel sharing option, said President Trina Cutter. With overlapping TV stations WEAO Akron and WNEO Youngstown, channel sharing was appealing, she had said (CD March 10 p3). The auction is too “transactional,” and it isn’t tailored to the negotiations of noncommercial broadcasting, she said now. The government approaches the auction in terms of whether the spectrum is more valuable for broadband use or for broadcast use, she said. “When you're a public service, you don’t think in terms of that. … You think in terms of the value being the public service that you're doing.”
Entering such agreements with what is “unknown” about the auction will be challenging, some observers said. “The principle unknowns are where the auction ends up in terms of the number of channels to be cleared,” said Haarsager. Stations that are channel sharing have to agree on how to price their bids in each successive round, he said. It’s like entering into a permanent marriage between two entities “whose goals may not always line up precisely,” Gray said. One party owns the transmission plan and the agreements “have to provide all kinds of contingencies for how the channel sharing partners will proceed way into the distant future,” he said.