TVN has Applied for an Extension of Another Concession

By wirtualnemedia.pl | 14 July 2023

TVN has applied to the National Broadcasting Council to extend the concession for the satellite channel TVN Style, Wirtualnemedia.pl has learned. The current concession of the women’s station expires on July 28, 2024. The broadcaster is currently waiting for the extension of three other concessions as well.

The broadcaster must apply for a license extension at least one year before its expiration. The filing of the application for TVN Style was confirmed to Wirtualnemedia.pl by Katarzyna Issat, head of corporate communications at TVN Warner Bros. Discovery.

TVN Style presents a program offer for women, has been broadcasting since 2004 and is available on cable networks and digital platforms.

TVN awaits licenses for TVN, TVN International and TVN Turbo

There are also three other license renewal applications at the National Broadcasting Council. These are for terrestrial station TVN (its license expires April 14, 2024), TVN International (expires February 10, 2024) and TVN Turbo (expires April 12, 2024).

Applications for all the stations were already submitted to the KRRiT at the end of last year, yet Council members have yet to address them. KRRiT chairman Maciej Świrski said in an interview with Wirtualnemedia.pl a dozen days ago that there was unlikely to be any chance that the TVN license issue would stand up at any of the Council’s July meetings (there will be one more on July 25 this year).

The TVN company believes that the TVN concession case should end quickly: “We submitted our application for the extension of the TVN channel’s license last November, so we have been waiting for the KRRiT’s decision on the matter for more than seven months. We believe it will happen immediately,” Catherine Issat told us recently.

Swirski with doubts about TVN’s ownership structure

The reason for the delay in making a decision is said to be the ownership structure of the broadcaster, which is unclear to the KRRiT. As reported by Maciej Swirski, the National Council has asked TVN who owns and manages “the entire chain of companies between TVN in Poland and Warner Bros. Discovery in the United States.”

“TVN refused to provide this information. That is why the proceedings are taking a long time. I sent a demand to TVN’s management 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 in the spring. He added that another request “to disclose the ownership structure” had been sent.

According to Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski, an opposition member of the Council, there are no contraindications to not dealing with the TVN concession. “The broadcaster has already met all the conditions, including the fact that it has submitted financial statements to us. Therefore, at the July 25 meeting, I will request that the matter be dealt with immediately,” Prof. Kowalski told us recently.

TVN SA-owned station HGTV Poland only got its license renewal at the end of April this year, after a 10-month wait. In February 2022. The National Council decided to extend the license for terrestrial station TVN7, the broadcaster waited more than a year for this decision. The concession for TVN24, on the other hand, waited 19 months – 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 legislation and the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the matter.