Speech B

2001 Mini-INPUT in Taipei

Prof. Rosenbauer

What is INPUT ? INPUT (an acronym derived from INternational PUblic Television), an alliance of television professionals from all corners of the globe, comes together out of a different kind of conviction: that more than a modern commodity, television is a medium that brings together editors, scriptwriters, and directors under a loose collective that links thousands of television professionals in a group that has always shared the conviction that television is a medium with a public mission, a part of our culture, and that it is worth fighting for together.

Next year INPUT will be 25, a significant anniversary worth celebrating properly at our annual gathering in Rotterdam. However, as has been our established custom, we will not mark this momentous occasion by uncorking Champagne or giving long speeches, but with innovative, unusual, thought-provoking, and controversial programs from all around the globe. These programs, nominated by national coordinators, will be carefully screened and selected by our 18-member committee of shop stewards during a 10-day Annual Screening Conference next March. Approximately 90 films and videos will be presented, shown, and discussed during this time, during which their respective producers, directors, and editors will be invited to take part in the discussions.

In theory, INPUTshould not even exist, for it has no set budget, no regular staff, and no set meeting place. Nevertheless, our gathering in a different country each year, hosted by members of our own television family, is the most anticipated and exciting occasion on the calendar for television and film professionals.

Following gatherings in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada), Fort Worth, Texas (USA), and Stuttgart (Germany), last year's meeting in Kapstadt marked our first conference ever in Africa, . Our host for 2003 will be decided between Denmark's Aarhus and Brazil's Porto Alegre. Each year's conference is sponsored by a local television entity, foundation, or city, with travel and accommodations taken care of by delegates or their respective organizations.

Fortunately, INPUT has many allies, such as UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Goethe Institute, Hoiso-Bunka Foundation, European Union's Media Programs…and a host of other organizations.

They come together for the sole purpose of promoting fine quality, outstanding television programming through INPUT, to bring the global network of television professionals closer together and support one another, without regard for commercial interests. Unlike any film or television festival, INPUT does not hand out awards; instead, it holds a series of forums to discuss the sometimes highly controversial forms and contents of a variety of programs. These discussions all touch upon the mission of television media dedicated to service in the public interest. The meeting will host exchange of concepts, along with discussion of the situations faced by today's television stations, producers and scriptwriters in every corner of the world.

INPUT was founded a quarter century ago by a group of American and European television industry professionals who came together under the recognition that television programming in Western nations lacked quality documentary and film programming. The European film environment of the day was nearly entirely dominated by American-made television series, sitcoms, and Hollywood movies, and theirs was essentially a one-way relationship: although many US-produced documentaries and programs made smooth inroads into the European television market, only the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the US embraced or purchased German- or French-produced programs.

In recent years INPUT has grown from an annual event held among a tight circle of Western European and North American television industry members, to become a full-fledged international gathering of delegates sent by television empires, stations, and independent producers, large and small, from five continents. In addition to our gala annual conference, INPUT also organizes a number of workshops. Organized by Crea TV with support from UNESCO, these workshops, held in Asia, Africa, Russia, and Latin America, are invested with the mission of promoting the development of cinema and TV around the world.

Workshops of this type, along with mini-INPUTs, are held frequently in North America and Western Europe. They are superb opportunities to explore the realm of art, experience lively forms of artistic expression, and new themes, as well as occasions for mutual encouragement and for augmenting understanding of media around the world.

Before you view today's program, allow me to give a basic overview of the state of public television today: as times have changed, even in developed countries such as France, England, and Germany, the broadcasting industry (including radio and television) is no longer treated as a cultural asset, but rather an economic means and service industry. Consequently, the following slogan tells us a good deal about the battle between public and commercial broadcasters for market share, funding, and influence: “minimize costs through sensible reform and ratings!”

The awkward situation of public broadcasting policy is well known: as long as public broadcasters achieve high ratings they are invariably accused of not taking into account the interests of the minority; and when ratings are low they are taken to task for lacking political or commercial acceptance, and some media concerns that are economically tied in with business interests even ask why anyone would spend money to produce such programming.

Of course we cannot turn back on years of efforts to popularize programming, such as moving arcane, quality art forms to art programs slot, or outside prime time slot. However, at the same time danger lurks behind the images we have worked so hard to cultivate; that is, we no longer fit the mission bestowed upon us. Thus Germany has begun to implement a series of measures intended to turn thinking around – a reform effort that demonstrates commitment and reflection on the core mission of public television: to provide people's need for information, education, culture, and entertainment, take the demands of the majority and the minority into account, disseminate and reflect local identity, furnish fine programming quality, and support and cultivate the next generation of successors. In addition, public broadcasters must serve as examples of democracy in action, fighting against the interference of political forces, always searching for truth, and forever standing on the side of the disadvantaged in society. Simply put, to act as a watchdog over power, especially the media, the “fourth estate”. The programs you will view today were produced to serve these objectives.

As president of INPUT, I wish to express my thanks to the Deutsches Kulturzentrum Taipei (German Cultural Center, Taipei), especially to the director whose unflagging efforts made this Taipei mini-INPUT possible. Lastly, I would like to wish everyone happy viewing, and hope that this workshop yields encouraging discussion and results.

Public Broadcasting Service : The Challenges of the 21st Century

Prof. Hansjurgen Rosenbauer

Thank you for the invitation to speak to you: on a subject that is close to our hearts as professionals and -I hope-as members of our societies, I will speak to you in a double function: as the president of INPUT and as head of a small public radio and television station in Potsdam, the capital of the state of Brandenburg. Right now we are in the process of merging with our neighboring station in Berlin. For those of you who are not that familiar with my country ： Berlin is located in the very middle of Brandenburg and Postdam used to be the residential city of the Prussian kings.

Just like PTS we are a rather young station, only ten years old. We were founded offer unification on the territory of former East Germany partly replacing the state run centralized communist system. 90 % of our employees are East Germans, most of them five live in Berlin and work in Babelsberg, where ORB is located. We provide a regional TV program that can be seen via satellite everywhere in Germany and in Western Europe. We offer together with the Berlin station six radio programs, four of them produced in Potsdam. We are a member of ARD,a network of 10 bigger and smaller public stations and we contribute to the different notional channels. We are responsible for the Digital Play Out Center of our network.

Our yearly budget is roughly 150 million US $ and about 700 people are permanently employed. The market share of our regional TV program on the basis or 24 hours is 6 %, during prime time about 10%. Last year we introduced a controlling system for our programming taking into account costs per minute, station.

Our revenue from commercials makes up about 5% of our budget, the rest are fees that have to be paid by everybody owning a radio our a TV set about $16 a month. We have quite a large number of freelancers working for us, and 60 % of the programs produced especially for ORB-TV come from independent production companies. From the very start we concentrated our in house productions on news and current affairs. We feel that production companies and independent filmmakers are a guarantee for a constant flow of new ideas and give us a high degree of flexibility.

I wouldn't now like to turn to the broader issues facing public television.If you should have any questions I am glad to answer them afterwards.

If you expect things to get easier: forget it ！ It ' s going to become more complicated and even more competitive. We see new challenges for public broadcasters everywhere in the world and particularly for newcomers in a market dominated by commercial networks,some of them global players. It is not enough anymore to offer good radio and exciting television programs.They have to be accompanied by internet services and become a part of the cross- media-market: radio, television, home-computer, internet.

Executives and producers will have to think three dimensional Multimedia will become one media. This process has slowed down somewhat, but will nevertheless continue.

All this, as you well know,is due to the so called “Digital Revolution” within which interactive multimedia/on-line broadcasting is becoming a most promising global market segment for the broadcasting industry. But we must also be aware that along with all these challenging multimedia promises, uncertainties are still remaining: In Germany for instance, public broadcasting as the major content provider needs to adopt, install and test respective digital technology （ which is still not fully reliable as we all experience every day). Public broadcasting has to experiment  further with new forms of interactive multimedia content.It has to assess audience reactions to this kind of programming.Our organizational structures and human resources need to be reorganized and developed. In order to meet the competition from large alliances in the global communications industry , a new relationship between creative and technical staff as well as between "users" and providers must be introduced. To make the complex shift towards full swing digital broadcasting possible, substantial support is required and has to be secured.

As public broadcasters, we are more than ever dependent on the further commitment by the public in order to create new and compelling material,to evaluate technological possibilities, and to be capable of reacting quickly to new opportunities. All this is going to cost money, and for a transition period we will spend a lot merely to get our signals from the stations to the people terrestrial. via cable and satellite.

Let's talk about content now,about programs, about the services we have to offer to our communities. It will-at least in my country-become more and-more difficult to justify a public system that is comfortably financed by fees and provides a rather wide variety of TV-and radio-channels ： two nationwide and compelling full services TV-networks,four nationwide special interest channels, eight regional TV-channels and about sixty radio stations, most of them via satellite available all over Germany and parts of Europe. Public-TV in Germany has an average market-share of 40%, public radio of more than 50 % in addition to this we offer a digital-bouquet that uses existing programs as the basis for redesigning them as separate services.I know that for some of you this sounds like paradise, and it sounds like paradise to my colleagues in many countries including the US.

Our commercial competitions would of course like to limit us to those programs that are expensive and do not reach larger audiences. So far, the supreme court has upheld the necessity of a public system as a precondition for the existence of the private sector. In contrast to the US for instance, public broadcasting was established after the Second World War long before commercial companies were allowed to enter the market.

But public radio and television at least in my understanding,is now part of our national heritage, it is part of our culture.It has to provide its audiences with basic information, education, entertainment.It has to present programs for majorities and minorities, and it has to guarantee a basic quality. It has to reflect regional identities, it has to deal the problems of its viewers. Public television has to reach audiences that commercial television is not even interested in. Those audiences are, naturally, those that don't translate directly into commercial profit.

No matter how global the big player go,the cannot beat us in this field: we have to be regional and local,concerned and honest,independent and critical. Of course we need the money and the opportunities to attract larger audiences with major sports events, TV-movies and prime-time shows. And in order to be able to do that, we should seek possibilities for co-productions and sponsoring. We have to maximize the potential of innovative and successful ideas of other public stations.

We should not bore people to death, we should not allow semi-professionalism. We must give space and means of production for new ideas, for experiments, for off-best-shows that may become main-stream.But most of all: people have to trust us. They have to believe us. They have to believe that we are there for them, and that the only reason for our existence is service to the public and not service to the shareholder.

we have to be aware of the dangers that lie the increasing numbers of Pay-TV channels. More and more our air space is being privatized, more and more we are supposed to regard the media as something that does not belong to the society as a whole, but as part of a market economy. Complete deregulation could mean that permission to provide audiences with TV-, radio and online- programs does not have to be given anymore by the representatives of the government, but is taken for granted.

Free-TV, not only commercial but first of all public free-TV, has to guarantee access to information,service and entertainment. It has to set standards. It has to make sure that the division into information-rich and information-poor does not harm society as a whole. Freedom of information does not mean the freedom to make money. The necessity to finance commercial media, to make a profit can lead to the contrary of TV and radio as part of the process of democracy.It can reduce the audience to mere consumers of yellow-press-journalism and of trash-programming.

As you know all too well, it will not be easy to convince politicians that they have to give us the means to really compete in all areas ： those that we are used to and the new ones that are developing. We need the public, we need the voice of the voters and we need convincing programs. It is our real challenge for the first years of the new millennium to make clear once again that public broadcasting as a public forum for communication, for the exchange of ideas,is essential for the functioning of a democracy. We have to make clear that new technologies should not be allowed to reduce our chances to reach a wide and diversified audience.

Public broadcasting is a mass media,it is-at least in my understanding-not propaganda tool. Public broadcasting is a mass media working in the public interest,it is working for the common good.And that makes all the difference ！