National Broadcasting Council Delays HGTV Licence Renewal, Tadeusz Kowalski Asks TVN to Send Ownership Structure

Press.pl | February 14, 2023

The National Broadcasting Council has been delaying the decision to renew the satellite license for HGTV (TVN Warner Bros. Discovery). The Chairman of the Council has held the Council and the broadcaster in check with a secret expert opinion on “license trading.” Professor Tadeusz Kowalski, an opposition member of the National Broadcasting Council, wishing to speed up the process, has proposed that TVN send the ownership structure to the National Broadcasting Council.

The broadcaster has been waiting for the decision for eight months, and HGTV’s license for cable and satellite broadcasting is valid only until June 26, 2023. In accordance with legal regulations, the application for the license for the next ten years must be filed no later than a year before the current license expires. The request from TVN (station broadcaster) for the renewal of HGTV’s license was sent to the National Broadcasting Council on 23 June 2022, when the National Council worked on its previous composition.

As we have unofficially learned, the National Broadcasting Council was to deal with this issue in January 2023. However, the Council did not address this issue in February, and the next meetings of the Council are scheduled for March. The process of HGTV program monitoring has already been carried out. It was intended to determine whether the broadcaster fulfilled its programming obligations. As we have learned, the outcome of the monitoring process was successful for HGTV.

However, the Chairman of the National Broadcasting Council, Maciej Świrski, also prepared an expert opinion on the issue of “license trading,” as he calls it. As we found out, the expert opinion has still not been disclosed, and the ownership structure of TVN is to be presented by the Chairman of the Council at future meetings.

This is why Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski, an opposition member of the National Broadcasting Council, requested that the Management Board of TVN should present the ownership structure to the National Council, answering whether there have been any changes in the structure after TVN 7 was granted a license in February 2022. As Kowalski told us yesterday, such information would be provided to all members of the Council, and making such information available could put an end to inquiries regarding the TVN’s ownership structure.

Doubts as to the ownership structure of TVN resulted in the lengthening of the procedures for granting licenses to TVN7 and TVN24 during the previous term of the Council.

So far, the license for TVN 7 has been the last TVN license renewed by the National Broadcasting Council. It took 19 months for the previous composition of the National Broadcasting Council to renew TVN24’s license (the Council decided this matter four days before the broadcasting rights were to expire) and over a year to renew TVN7’s license.

There are more applications for license renewal waiting to be reviewed, including an application for the main TVN channel (the license expires on 14 April 2024), TVN Turbo (the license expires on 12 February 2024), and TVN International (the license expires on 10 February 2024).