No Exclusives for PBS, Media Groups Demand
Calls to bar PBS from making exclusive deals involving taxpayer-supported programming have followed RCN complaints to the FCC about trouble securing PBS Kids Sprout programming from Comcast. Launched last April, Sprout is a joint venture of PBS, Comcast, Sesame Workshop and HIT (CD April 4 p5). In the run-up to FCC approval of the Adelphia merger, RCN told the FCC it “experienced a host of difficulties in accessing” Sprout VoD programming, including “delay in negotiating with RCN for carriage of this programming.” To keep the FCC from imposing conditions on the merger, Comcast agreed to make the programming available to VoD aggregators like TVN for 3 years, according to PBS and other officials.
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“The PBS Kids and Sprout programming at issue is developed in no small part with public money and donations from viewers and businesses that had no intention of giving Comcast a club to beat competitors over the head,” said Harold Feld, senior vp of the Media Access Project. PBS and other public institutions are vulnerable to such “exploitation” because Congress “scorned” them, repeatedly cutting their funding, and “chastised them for living as ‘permanent dependencies,'” he added: “Small wonder that these institutions increasingly drift away from their missions and ideals.”
Public broadcasters should acknowledge their content’s value, Feld said. If they must cut deals like the one with Comcast, they should seek more than one bid “rather than take an offer negotiated in secret. There is a value in not signing exclusive deals,” he said. One way to keep federally funded programming from being locked up would be to bar exclusive deals with a law or a rule, he said. It’s not true that good contract terms depend on exclusivity, Feld said, adding that RCN’s experience, which showed the popularity of the programs in question, “clearly demonstrated” that despite efforts to cut funding “this is very valuable programming.”
PBS doesn’t and can’t control Comcast business practices because it’s a minority partner in Sprout, PBS Vp Lea Sloan said, noting that while taxpayers fund its programs PBS doesn’t own them. PBS actually “rents the programs for a limited period,” she said: “PBS does not have direct control over the producers’ libraries and that’s the programming that’s on Sprout.” PBS only has rights during a 2-5 year window on the network after which they revert to producers, she said.
If people realized what it costs to own program rights, “our federal contribution will be a lot higher or Sesame wouldn’t be criticized for its product sales,” Sloan said. That’s because Sesame would be making a lot of money on what it distributes to PBS, which can buy Sesame programming for “what it’s worth,” she said: “But we only pay for a small proportion of the costs of producing those shows and that gives us a small proportion of the rights.”
The exclusive PBS deal with Comcast runs counter to the PBS mission, which holds that public TV is “supposed to be public and its services are supposed to universal,” Jerrold Starr, exec. dir. of the Citizens for Independent Public Bcstg., said. The U.S. should bar exclusive deals that result in programs being locked up, he added. RCN’s situation was only a “mild indiscretion” compared with public TV’s plans to use part of its digital spectrum to generate revenue, he said: “That did represent a commercialization of public subsidy.”