This may not be news to some, but I was reading the Public Broadcasting
newspaper yesterday (Current) and saw an article that may be of interest to USA
participants in this list.
For many years WLIW has been packaging BBC World TV newscasts for distribution
to public TV stations in the USA. The program has the best TV coverage of
international news events available in the USA with the possible exception of
CCTV-9's 24x7 english language service.
The programs are received on Long Island at 1500 eastern time, edited for
underwriter credits and sent by satellite to stations contracted to air the
half-hour newscast. I have seen different stations air the program from 1730
eastern to 0030 eastern time. By 0030 the news is at least 9 1/2 hours stale.
For example, Maryland Public TV moved the newscast from 1730 eastern to
midnight about a year ago but WPBT Miami still carries it at 1730. The contract
with WLIW came up for renewal recently and BBC issued a request for proposal.
WLIW proposed more of the same.
KCET in Los Angeles responded with a proposed contract that will reduce the
number of stations carrying the program to only one in each market. They
promised to constrain the station's re-airing time to between 1700 and 1900
eastern time. They also put forth some plans to enhance marketing of the
program. KCET got the contract and will take over in October according to the
article.
The article speculated that the BBC did not want to have the program airing in
competition to a new one hour news segment for the USA airing at 1900 eastern
time on BBC America. BBC is trying to boost the commercial cable/satellite
channel to make some more dollars flow to the UK to help pay for the cost of
BBC program production.
In the Washington, DC market the program airs on several stations now plus
coverage on most cable systems from Maryland Public TV. It will be interesting
to see if WETA can still take the program if Maryland Public TV wants it. MPT
has state-wide coverage of Maryland from the Delmarva peninsula to the western
panhandle. Of course WETA covers the opinion formers the BBC is most
interested in reaching.
I think Washington is a separate metropolitan statistical area from Baltimore,
but the entire eastern part of DC is bordered by Maryland and nicely served by
MPT as is the rest of the state. It will be interesting to see how this
possible conflict resolves itself.
Joe Buch
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