TVN Has Been Waiting for Seven Months for a License Renewal

By Jacek Kowalski, wirtualnemedia.pl | 10 July 2023

At the last of the July meetings, KRRiT members may take up the issue of extending the TVN license, Wirtualnemedia.pl has learned. This will be requested by Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski. In his opinion, there are no longer any contraindications for the matter to go to deliberations. The broadcaster has been waiting for a decision for seven months.

TVN SA is not only waiting for the extension of the concession of its main channel (it expires on April 14, 2024), but also TVN International (end of broadcasting rights: February 10 next year), TVN Turbo (concession until April 12). The company is seeking to extend the broadcasting rights of these channels for another 10 years, while applications (according to regulations) had to be submitted no later than one year before the expiration of the rights.

Already late last year, the National Broadcasting Council received applications to extend the broadcasting licenses for TVN, TVN International and TVN Turbo. Despite this, KRRiT members have yet to deal with them. We asked the National Council why the delay in voting on the reconcession for TVN’s main channel, as well as at what stage the council’s work on it is, but received no answer.

“We believe it will happen immediately,” he added.

In an interview with Wirtualnemedia.pl a dozen days ago, KRRiT chairman Maciej Świrski said that there was unlikely to be any chance that the TVN license issue would come up at any of the Council’s July meetings.

“What I will certainly try to do before the vacations is to put the discussion of TOK FM monitoring back on the agenda at one of the July meetings,” he said. “This is what happened – last week the license for TOK FM was renewed. At the time, the Council also published the conclusions of the station’s monitoring.”

TVN SA is of the opinion 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,” Katarzyna Issat, head of corporate communications for TVN Warner Bros. Discovery.

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, we hear from the Council. However, according to Prof. Tadeusz Kowalski, a member of the Council, there are no contraindications at this time for 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 meeting on July 25, I will request that the matter be dealt with immediately,” Prof. Kowalski tells Wirtualnemedia.pl. According to our interlocutor – there is also no rule on how long broadcasters should wait for reconcession: “Some wait three weeks, others apparently seven months,” he stresses.

Świrski: “Council members concerned”.

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 came up with the initiative for TVN to draft 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 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, 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 is 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, which was taken over by the Discovery conglomerate three years later. In contrast, 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.