PBS and its two biggest member stations announce this week Horizons TV, which they expect will begin operations as public TV's first national cable TV channel about a year from now.
"The best way to define it is probably, 'a cultural and intellectual
counterpart to C-SPAN,"' says Larry Grossman, head of the project
and former president of PBS and of NBC News.
Like C-SPAN, Horizons TV would put high-content, low-cost programming on cable, based on existing public events and largely supported through fees paid by cable systems. The difference would be that Horizons TV cameras would cover events in the arts and sciences beyond C-SPAN's public-affairs focus. And unlike C-SPAN, Horizons TV would rely in part on advertising for support.
Grossman, WNET President Bill Baker, WGBH President Henry Becton and PBS Executive Vice President Bob Ottenhoff are scheduled to detail the plan at a press conference Tuesday, May 18, at the New York Public Library.
"It's based on a very simple and I think quite wonderful concept: to scour the country and find the most interesting, most entertaining talks, readings, lectures, forums, performances — events that go on in all the major universities, museums and art centers," Grossman says. “The stars will be the great minds of our time — playwrights, scientists, religious leaders."
The business plan shows WGBH, WNET and PBS investing $12 million in equal shares over the next five years, until the separate nonprofit company breaks even and begins to repay the investment, according to Grossman. “Each is committed at this point to a third of expenses for the next couple of years. The major expenses don't kick in until we go operational."
Other public TV organizations, cable firms, advertisers and others would be invited to provide initial funding, and could have seats on the board, Grossman says. The planners have discussed this with cable companies. But Grossman contends that it's “essential" that public TV retain majority control of the service.
Horizons TV would start up when it has commitments from cable systems covering 5 million households, which is expected by summer 1994. [Later article: Four major cable operators endorsed the plan late in 1994.] The plan anticipates its reach to grow to 12 million or more households in the fourth year, when the channel would break even.
A draw for cable systems
Planners expect that cable operators — soon to multiply their channel capacity through digital compression — will want to pick up the new service as a complement to C-SPAN and as a means of attracting the highly educated people who are now hard sales for the cable industry.
To carry the service, cable operators will pay a per-household fee, as they do for most cable services. Nonpremium services charge three to 20 cents per household, Grossman says, and Horizons TV would price itself at the low end of that range — the exact fee will be determined in negotiation.
Though advertising would provide a relatively small portion of revenues, it would “open up a whole new avenue for publishers," among others. Books and other products could be sold through spots on the channel “with some dignity and quality," Grossman says, and that would provide “some inducement" for book-world stars like Stephen J. Gould and Kurt Vonnegut to appear on the channel. Most ads would be content-related. “It's not an avenue for ginsu knives and vegetable slicers."
WGBH, WNET and PBS, which have an ongoing, jointly controlled nonprofit to explore cable opportunities, have been considering the idea for about a year, according to Grossman. They went ahead, he says, because it meets three criteria: it fits with PTV's mission, it would not compete with or undercut PTV stations' programming, and it has the promise of being self-supporting.
To assess that third factor, the group engaged Natalie Hunter, the former head of operations for the ESPN network, to work on financial plans. Hunter earlier served with Grossman as chief financial officer at NBC News. Also involved in the planning are Diane Asadorian and Pat Delaney, cable liaisons at WGBH and WNET. The project held focus groups in cooperation with Continental Cablevision and did a mail survey of 30,000 WGBH members and Continental subscribers and nonsubscribers. Expressions of interest in the proposed channel “far exceeded" expectations, Grossman says.
The group also commissioned former MTV Networks strategic planner Marshall Cohen to survey top cable executives.
Grand Alliance recalled
Grossman says Cohen's research confirms that cable leaders would regard the connection with major cultural institutions — through Horizons TV — as a major asset.
The plan for Horizons TV shares characteristics with a 1980 proposal by then-PBS President Grossman for a “Grand Alliance" of public TV and arts institutions to start an arts-oriented cable channel. The 1980 plan sounded like an extension of Live from the Met, but the economics of the 1993 plan dictate production values closer to C-SPAN's.
"In retrospect," Grossman observes, “it's good that we didn't go in that early because we probably would have gone broke."
Economics will determine the level of production values and the general resemblance to entertainment programming. “We don't want to get into elaborate lighting and union requirements," Grossman says.
The channel would pay producers, including local PTV stations and cable operators, for videotaping local events, and would pay “a modest honorarium" to participants on camera.
One aspect of Horizons TV that recalls the Grand Alliance is the connection to cultural institutions. The new channel would be overseen by a program board that includes, so far, former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin, television reform activist Peggy Charren, Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, theatrical director Lloyd Richards and Columbia University President Michael Sovern.
Grossman, who says he “agreed to get the thing launched," has lectured and written extensively since his terms as president of PBS (1975-83) and NBC News (1984-88). He has been associated with Columbia University's Gannett Media Studies Center and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School, and is writing a book on "electronic democracy and the new politics," due to the editors at Free Press/Macmillan by the end of the year.
He has also fought back an attack of skin cancer, which required facial surgery. “It's been a tough but interesting couple of years," he says.
Grossman is also serving on the task force on the future of public broadcasting that is now completing its work under the aegis of the Twentieth Century Fund. The task force report is due out next month.
Horizons Cable this month announced progress in marketing to its first customer — cable operators who control the "shelf space" of their soon-to-be expanded systems.
During the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, Calif., four multiple system operators that altogether serve nearly 6 million subscribers endorsed the PBS/WNET/WGBH venture, which will offer C-SPAN-like coverage of intellectual, cultural and educational events.
Those MSOs include Cablevision Systems Corp. of Woodbury, N.Y.; Century Communications of New Canaan, Conn.; Continental Cablevision Inc. of Boston; and Prime Cable in Austin.
With "the blessings of the heads of these companies" Horizons now starts negotiating for specific carriage deals, said President Larry Grossman. Each system has different requirements and capacities to take into consideration, and he emphasized that the difficult work of hashing out agreements still lies ahead.
A late 1994 launch still looks do-able for Horizons, according to Grossman and Marshall Cohen, MTV founder and a consultant to the new venture.
Although a recent survey by Multichannel News listed some 60 new cable networks in competition for the expanded channel space, Horizons has “a lot going it for it," said Cohen.
A direct mail survey of 30,000 WGBH contributors showed that 16 percent of those without cable said they'd sign up just to receive Horizons. To cable operators, the ability to get even "a percentage or two of the 'nevers"' — diehard nonsubscribers for whom cable's marketing pitch of "movies, more movies, and sports" holds no appeal — "that's a very significant number."
Stymied by the slowdown in expansion of cable channel capacity, the would-be cable network Horizons has made four pilots to demonstrate its concept — "C-SPAN for the arts and letters," as it has been described in showbiz shorthand.
Horizons President Larry Grossman, a former president of PBS and of NBC News, said the four half-hour pilots had gotten a "very enthusiastic" reception from PBS officials when he met with them this month about scheduling them.
The four pilot shows of PBS Horizons, funded by CPB, follow the original concept of inexpensively produced recordings of lectures, readings and debates staged by universities and other cultural institutions.
They include a panel of bestselling authors at the University of Mississippi; the PEN Faulkner conference, with major writers speaking about their first loves; anthropologists Jane Goodall and Richard Leakey at the National Geographic Society; and a series of poetry readings at the University of California at San Diego. Most were taped for Horizons by crews from the sponsoring institutions.
The pilots will help sell Horizons to cable operators and funders, according to Boston-based General Manager Diane Asadorian.
But the half-hour pilots, which contain only highlights of the tapings, can also give Horizons an outlet while it builds a backlog of tapes, and could be continued on public TV stations even after the cable network starts up, Grossman told Current.
Until cable is deregulated, there's little room for launching new cable networks, said Asadorian. Under present FCC regulation of cable operators' rates, the operators have limited incentive to add channel capacity, so the expected use of digital compression for that purpose has not blossomed as expected.
In addition, the cable market is already crowded because operators are obligated to carry a series of other new broadcaster-owned cable networks — among them, ABC's second ESPN channel and NBC's America's Talking network — in exchange for the right to retransmit the broadcasters' local signals.
When capacity opens up for new cable networks, they may end up carried by local cable operators or by competing phone companies or by some patchwork of both, said Asadorian.
A third outlet is already available. Horizons has a carriage agreement with Hughes Electronics' Direct TV direct broadcast satellite network, which Horizons can activate when it has attracted enough carriage on cable, according to Grossman.
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posted April 24, 2005
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