The National Broadcasting Council Extends TVN’s Terrestrial Concession. “Five votes in favor.”

By wirtualnemedia.pl | 9 November 2023

The National Broadcasting Council decided on Thursday to extend the terrestrial license of the main TVN channel for 10 years. As determined by the Wirtualnemedia.pl portal – the decision was made unanimously. The satellite licenses of the broadcaster’s two other stations were also extended. “We are very pleased that the National Broadcasting Council has finally granted TVN a concession for another 10 years,” comments Kasia Kieli, CEO of TVN.

The current terrestrial license of the main TVN channel will expire on April 14, 2024. The broadcaster, in accordance with regulations, applied for an extension of the broadcasting rights more than a year before that date – as early as last November.

The National Broadcasting Council at Thursday’s meeting also extended the satellite licenses of TVN International (the current one is valid until February 10, 2024) and TVN Turbo (the current one will expire on April 12, 2024).

“The decision in made unanimously, there were five votes “for” and none “against.” The chairman also raised no objections,” Professor Tadeusz Kowalski of the KRRiT tells Wirtualnemedia.pl.  “I didn’t manage to ask why for so many months the council members and the chairman created problems, and in the end everything went very smoothly, but I think the answer could be interesting,” he adds.

A spokeswoman for the National Broadcasting Council confirms: all licenses were extended unanimously. The members of the current National Council, appointed last fall: chairman Maciej Świrski, Agnieszka Glapiak, Marzena Paczuska, Hanna Karp and Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski, voted unanimously in favor.

“We are very pleased that the National Broadcasting Council has finally granted TVN a license for another 10 years. This is also very good news for our viewers, who can be sure today that they will be able to watch their favorite programs on the most popular channel on Polish television without any obstacles,” commented Kasia Kieli, president & managing director of Warner Bros. Discovery in Poland, CEO of TVN.

KRRiT wanted data on the ownership structure of broadcaster TVN

The National Council has only now renewed TVN’s station licenses because some of its members had doubts about the broadcaster’s ownership structure. However, according to Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski, there are no contraindications at this time to not dealing with the TVN concession. – The broadcaster has already fulfilled all the conditions, including the fact that it has submitted financial statements to us,” Prof. Kowalski told Wirtualnemedia.pl in July this year. According to our interlocutor, there is also no rule on how long broadcasters should wait for a reconcession: “Some wait three weeks, others apparently wait seven months,” he stresses.

Back in March of this year, Prof. Kowalski requested, in the context of a concession for another station in TVN’s portfolio – HGTV – that the broadcaster send the KRRiT a document clearly describing the ownership structure. For it is this structure that is at stake in the renewal of any concession for TVN SA. – In my opinion, everything about TVN’s ownership structure is clear, but since this thing is holding up the issuance of a license, I have come up with an initiative for TVN to draw up a document describing this structure and send it to the Council. Maybe this will shorten the process of extending the license,” Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski told us at the time.

However, during a June meeting with representatives of the parliamentary committee on culture and mass media, Maciej Swirski said that members of the Council also received “media information about ties to Russia of companies in the broadcaster’s ownership consortium.” The conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery actually broadcast its international stations in Russia, but left the country last year. Swirski stressed that the KRRiT had approached TVN, asking who owns and manages “the entire chain of companies between TVN in Poland and Warner Bros. Discovery in the United States.”

“TVN has refused to provide this information. That is why the proceedings are taking a long time. I sent a demand to TVN’s board of directors to disclose who is in the structure. They sent a rather brazen response. We are now checking who is who and what the connections are,” Swirski said, stressing that another demand to “disclose the ownership structure” has already been sent.

How it was with concessions for TVN

TVN-owned station HGTV Poland only got its license renewed for another 10 years at the end of April this year, after a ten-month wait. While granting the broadcasting rights, the KRRiT stressed that it was still analyzing the ownership structure of the channel’s broadcaster. It also stressed that TVN, as of April 8, 2022, is owned by US-based Warner Bros. Discovery, formed by the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery. It was explained that “the proceedings conducted in this case (structure – JK) are aimed at investigating the compliance of TVN S.A.’s capital composition with the provisions of the media law.”

The broadcaster, in turn, waited 19 months for a license for TVN24. It was granted in September 2021, but the regulator in a resolution assessed that the channel should not get it, and expressed the need for new regulations and the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the matter.

The TVN Group has been in American hands since mid-2015, when it was acquired by Scripps Networks Interactive, three years later taken over by the Discovery conglomerate. On the other hand, this spring. Discovery finalized its $40 billion acquisition of WarnerMedia from telecom conglomerate AT&T. For years, TVN’s direct owner was Polish Television Holding, registered in Amsterdam. Since the middle of last year, the broadcaster has been owned by Discovery Communications Benelux.