Council’s Decision Regarding TVN Warner Bros. Discovery in January

wirtualnemedia | January 19, 2023

The National Broadcasting Council is close to deciding on the renewal of HGTV’s license. As we have learned, the vote on this matter should take place this month, most likely on Tuesday, 31 January (previously stated 25 January).

HGTV’s satellite and cable licenses expire on June 26th, 2023. The regulator received the request for license renewal on June 23rd, 2022, i.e., three days before the required deadline. In the autumn, the spokeswoman for the National Broadcasting Council, Teresa Brykczyńska, said the decision would be made at one of the forthcoming meetings. However, this did not happen.

“The procedure was slightly prolonged because most of the Council members requested program monitoring. For me, this was quite a surprise. If they want to know how to care about gardens or arrange a flat, why not. I do not know the results of the monitoring, but I have the impression that everything is in order. A review of one week of programming takes about two to three weeks. Analysts must carefully watch the program, encode, and calculate the results. This is not a big department; it has few employees. In my opinion, such reviews should be follow-up reviews and not pre-emptive reviews. It is different when you receive complaints or signals from certain organizations. It makes no sense to perform a thorough scrutiny of more than 200 Polish channels,” Professor Kowalski explained.

The Chairman of the Council, Maciej Świrski, also requested an additional expert opinion. “The Chairman requested an opinion on, as he worded it, “license trading” in relation to TVN. This opinion was to be prepared for November 21st. I have asked for this opinion to be made available and was told by the Chairman that the opinion was incomplete and that he would pass it on when it is complete. For the time being, I do not have this opinion, so I do not know what it is about. I do not know what “license trading” could mean, and I really do not understand the meaning of such an activity. Nor do I know why the opinion is incomplete, so I can only wait,” said Professor Kowalski.

The National Broadcasting Council has not explained why such an expert opinion was ordered nor what the expert opinion contributed to the license renewal process. It might refer to the history of HGTV, which was launched based on the license held by TVN Meteo Active, which was operating from 2015 to 2017. This channel was established with TVN Meteo’s license (2003-2015).

In recent years, TVN24 and TVN7 re-licensing processes took more than a dozen months. The National Broadcasting Council of the previous term of office argued that the stations breached the Broadcasting Act. The Act provides that a license may be received only by a broadcaster established in the European Economic Area. The owner of TVN is established in Amsterdam but is owned by an American group, Warner Bros. Discovery. Licenses of both channels were renewed several days before their expiry. The United States protested strongly against the regulator’s attitude. At that time, Chairman Witold Kołodziejski was in favor of license renewal.

His successor, Maciej Świrski, is known for his critical statements about TVN. “I have an impression that opportunism should be TVN’s new logo,” he said on TVP Info two years ago. Recently, Świrski has initiated ex officio procedure to fine TVN for broadcasting the Siła kłamstwa report by Piotr Świerczek. The author of the report, Piotr Świerczek, proved that the parliamentary subcommittee led by Antoni Macierewicz, which investigated the Smolensk air disaster, hid evidence that was inconsistent with the theory of the attack.