School service ally of public TV purchased by Discovery

Originally published in Current, Sept. 8, 2003
By Steve Behrens

United Learning, the private company that signed this year to provide K-12 classroom video services on behalf of many public TV stations, announced last week that it will be acquired by Discovery Communications, a major primetime competitor of PBS.

United’s two-year-old digital service for classroom video, unitedstreaming, reaches 24,000 schools, more than half through subscriptions involving public TV stations, said Joel Altschul, United Learning’s chairman and c.e.o. in a telephonic press conference.

Public TV had mixed reactions to the surprising news. The opportunity to draw on Discovery’s video resources is “really exciting,” said Marion Rice, senior director of education media and interactive at Oregon Public Broadcasting. She’d like Oregon schools to have access to both PBS and Discovery material. “What a powerful collaboration Discovery and PBS could have for delivering this kind of content. They could go off and compete in the TV space, but there’s a lot to be gained from working together in this space.”

Other pubcasters fear that Discovery will stop working with them after the school services are established and go it alone without public TV, said Rod Bates, g.m. of Nebraska ETV, which subscribes to unitedstreaming.

Bates is also chairman of onCourse, a public TV project that ran out of money while attempting to develop a competing service for schools. As a fallback, onCourse negotiated a three-year deal this spring for unitedstreaming to provide the service to schools onCourse had hoped to serve
directly.

“I’m not that worked up about this,” Bates commented about the purchase of United Learning. United pledged to honor contracts, he said, and he expects it will see the benefit of a schools partnership with public TV stations. Meanwhile, onCourse is keeping its option open to develop independent services to schools over the longer term.

Discovery’s entry highlights the bustling new school video market. While United and other companies have launched services in the last two years, public TV organizations are jostling for larger roles as well:

In Alexandria, Va., PBS is exploring the feasibility of starting a separate “premier media offering for schools” to be offered through PBS stations. It would take advantage of a major public TV asset, drawing video from PBS programming, said Cindy Johanson, senior v.p. She will propose options to the PBS Board in October.

PBS has been talking with Boston’s WGBH about building a service on the model of the station’s Teachers’ Domain online service, which could be combined with PBS’s own TeacherSource service, Johanson told Current. The network has been “aggressively” acquiring rights for digital uses of programming when it buys broadcast rights, she said.

If it develops a service for schools, she said, it will try for a flexible design recognizing that stations may also offer such services as unitedstreaming or Chalkwaves, a competing public TV service operating in the Midwest.

In Tucson, some 200 public TV execs surveyed options in education at a “summit” in July. Public TV is “ripe” for a new burst of productive cooperation, said Skip Hinton, president of the National Educational Telecommunications Association, organizer of the event. Execs agreed that services to schools are “an absolute must” for public TV stations, he said.

In Washington, onCourse is pursuing funding to develop its own software systems for on-demand school services. In August the group announced an alliance with Florida-based OnStream Media Corp. to collaborate on media delivery systems. The two companies hope to get capital for the work from the big defense contractor SAIC, according to Bates.

Bates had been interested in negotiating an equity partnership between United and onCourse, but now expects any partnership would be less likely because of Discovery’s size and wealth.

In Dallas, public TV station KERA is preparing to spin off a subsidiary to provide K-12 classroom video segments through datacasting on public TV’s digital channels across the country. The spinoff, named the Digital Network, will bring in investors to join KERA in owning it as a for-profit company, says its president, Bo Bernard.

Classroom video is just one of several DTV datacasting services the company aims to develop through which stations to generate revenues.
Though the United Learning initially distributed its video through Internet streaming, it expects schools to increasingly store the videos on their own servers, giving them quicker access and higher quality video. The model, used by Midwestern public TV stations in the Chalkwaves school service, is also being adopted by KERA’s new service and others.

Discovery released few details of its plans for classroom services. Altschul, son of founder Gilbert Altschul, will continue to head United Learning, based in Evanston, Ill. He will report to Michela English, president of Discovery Consumer Products. Discovery Channel School, a supplier of videotapes and CD-ROMs for schools, also reports to her.

Discovery declined to disclose what it paid for United.

Altshul said the school service will benefit from access to Discovery’s vast video archives and possibly BBC material, through a longterm alliance between Discovery and the British pubcaster.

He said United will also offer a Spanish version of its digital service for schools.

United charges about $1,000 a year for a grade school to have online access to 2,000 videos and more than 20,000 bitesize video clips, Altschul said. Like Chalkwaves and other videoclip services, the material is correlated with state teaching plans and accessible through an online search engine.

Posted Sept. 15, 2003
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