Opening of broadcast archives to private sector stalls in Parliament
An unprecedented move to open the national radio and television archives to all broadcasters hit a procedural stumbling block last week, but proponents vowed to push for parliamentary approval in the near future.
The national archive is considered a treasure trove of cultural history. Private broadcasters are pushing for greater access to the electronic archives because of their application to a variety of programming formats including news, documentary and film production. Moreover, fees generated from opening the archive would aid preservation efforts, proponents said.
But this cultural asset, bequeathed by an agreement in 1994 to public radio and TV broadcasters for 10 years, has become a hot potato among public and private sector interests, according to media watchers.
Lawmakers were slated last week to propose changes to the government's broadcast bill that would have required the National Radio and Television Council (KRRiTV) to make archives accessible to all broadcasters. But because the proposed amendment wasn't part of the government's proposal, it could violate procedural rules, according to the Sejm's legislation office, and therefore the motion was withdrawn.
"There are two options," said Tomasz Welnicki, deputy head of the Culture and Media Parliamentary Committee and a member of Solidarity Election Action (AWS). "Either we wait until the government proposes further changes to the broadcasting bill or we'll submit the appropriate amendment as a separate legislative initiative," Welnicki said, adding the future of the television and radio archives might be decided in February, if not this month.
"The rental of archives would guarantee funds for its maintenance," Welnicki argued. "We have received signals that the archives are in very bad shape and Telewizja Polska (TVP), which currently has the only rights to protect the archives, isn't sharing them with any other station."
But such a move does not make economic sense, countered Pawel Sosnowski, head of the press office for public broadcaster TVP. "It would be too costly to do that and besides, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) also holds national TV archives that it can rent," he said.
According to current media law, electronic archives are owned by the state treasury, which is why the State Archives (AP) claim rights to them. Under a 1994 agreement between the AP and the KRRiTV, TVP and public radio have first rights to the archives for 10 years.
Nevertheless, TVP's management wanted to use the archives as an asset in its alliance with Canal+, which would help it join the Cyfra+ digital platform, Welnicki said.
"Why should Canal+ use the TV archives under preferential conditions and not other broadcasters?" Welnicki argued. "It's a scandal because the archives are not TVP's property, they're national property."
But in TVP's agreement signed with Canal+, nothing was mentioned about treating the archives as assets, said Sosnowski of TVP.
Although TVP may be downplaying the value of the archives, private broadcasters claim that TVP sets a premium on their use.
"Prices set by TVP are so high that they discourage us," said Piotr Radziszewski, news director at broadcaster tvn, which instead pays to use archives from Reuters and Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych, a documentary production company.
"TVP dictates prices, which in reality makes it impossible to buy the footage, not to mention the extremely long time you have to wait for it," Radziszewski said.
Access to archives should be a normal procedure, like using a national library for an acceptable fee, he said. "Television was a state company and it was the entire nation that built it," Radziszewski said.
Under communist rule, TVP was the country's only television broadcaster. Viewers paid a monthly, per-household fee in exchange for receiving public radio and television transmissions. Today, TVP still depends on this "subscriber" fee, but according to TVP President Robert Kwiatkowski, its 56% collection rate is too low. This is one reason why TVP depends on ad revenue, he said.
The station's critics, however, accuse TVP of being overly commercialized and its management of treating the station as private property.
"The archives are not owned by TVP, the station is only its depositary," Welnicki said.
And the value of the archives is priceless, Radziszewski said. "It's possible that they were meant to be used as assets by Cyfra+," he said. "With such footage it would be possible to create new thematic channels, for instance, a sports documentary channel, almost for free."
Sosnowski contends, however, that any new thematic channel created as a result of the alliance with Canal+ would be owned by TVP. "We have 10% of the stock in this company and a possibility to acquire a further 30%; let's not forget that. And we will work in our own interests," he said.
But under the 1994 agreement between the radio and TV council and the AP, public broadcasters are required to maintain and make the archives accessible. "As far as I know only public radio makes them (archives) really accessible," Welnicki said.
