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PBS Foundation
News & Information
Keynote Address
Paula Kerger
PBS Showcase
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Good morning and welcome. It's wonderful to see everyone together like this. I'm thrilled to be here for my first PBS Showcase as president of PBS. My first two months on the job have been a quite a ride. In fact, I think I have a few suggestions for the Disney Company on how they can add a few thrills to Space Mountain.
But seriously, it's been a wonderful experience, and I especially want to thank some of the many special people who have been so gracious and helpful in orienting me over the past weeks. At the head of the list are Mary Bitterman and the Board of PBS. Thank you for your excellent guidance. I also want to thank Wayne Godwin and the staff of PBS, who have been simply marvelous. And, I don't want to forget Pat Harrison and John Lawson who will be up here on stage with me shortly. And thank you to all my colleagues around the country for your good thoughts and excellent suggestions. You've made this challenging time a true pleasure for me and I feel privileged to have you as my partners. I look forward to sharing with you my organization and strategic plans in the months ahead.
I am hopeful that you will all learn a great deal over the next few days and I am confident that you will have many opportunities to take pride in the amazing amount of creativity, vision and dedication that is collectively found among you. You are truly an amazing group of people and America owes you a great deal of admiration and gratitude for what you make possible.
In addition to sharing and learning, I hope you will get a chance to enjoy yourselves. Of course, Orlando is famous for being a place to escape reality and lose yourself in a fantasy world. And who can't use a little of that? Especially in this business!
But today I want to focus on reality. I want to make sure that we are all acutely aware of the reality we face – its challenges, its obstacles, AND its exciting potential.
The essence of this reality is that we are living in a time of revolution. The digital revolution is one that is reshaping our world, and nowhere are its effects being felt more profoundly than in our industry.
With that in mind, I want to call attention to the upcoming talk by Diane Mermigas from The Hollywood Reporter, who will be the closing speaker in the general session on Friday. I have invited her here because of her special insight into the dizzying developments in today's media. I know that her observations on our future challenges and potential will be fascinating and important, so I urge you to attend her talk. You will find it well worth your while.
As I consider those very developments that Diane will expound upon, I'd like to quote another person of great insight. John Scully, the former chairman of Apple computer, not surprisingly, had a keen sense of the big picture some time ago. He said "The Information Age is a revolution. It's a revolution that's global in scope, with few safe harbors for isolationists."
And it's true. The digital revolution cannot be ignored. And it is asking a lot of us. It's forcing us to rethink many long-held notions of how to go about our business. And it's calling on us to reinvent ourselves, seemingly on a daily basis.
Up until now, we have been in the television business. We have created programs and put them out there over a single channel for our audiences to watch according to a set schedule. But I probably don't have to tell you that, with each passing day, that paradigm is fading into the past. Now we are entering a time when the viewers are choosing what they want to watch, when they want to watch, using an astonishing array of media – TIVO and DVR's, On-Demand services, podcasts, cell phones and PDAs, streaming video over the Internet, and who knows what fantastic new device will be announced next week.
Some 50 million U.S. households now have broadband Internet service. Nearly 200 million have cell phones. By one estimate, some ten percent of those cell phones are now video equipped, but that percentage is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Of course, the iPod is practically a standard accessory for many Americans these days.
Over the past several months, the commercial and cable networks have been relentlessly revamping their business models to take advantage of the new multi-platform world we live in. You're probably aware of many of the recent developments. Apple's announcement last October that it would sell episodes of "LOST" and "Desperate Housewives" on iTunes. Disney's decision last month to start streaming those same shows on its Web site. NBC Universal has added video players to its homepage and is creating Web-only programs. Two weeks ago, CBS launched a broadband channel called Innertube, which will include series created for the Web, as well as material that CBS has already broadcast on TV. The president of CBS Paramount Network Television, Nancy Tellem, was quoted as saying: ''We want our content to be all the places our viewers are – and they are certainly on the Internet."
Indeed they are – often at wildly popular sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which incorporate streaming video as a means to building communities of like-minded individuals. At the same time, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are all rolling out their own Web-TV services.
This is the revolution. And, with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron, it is being televised.
It's a bewildering time. It's hard to keep up with it all but, mark my words, it is full of promise for us.
John Scully continued his thought by stating that this revolution is one "in which winning organizations will be those that give individuals the chance to personally make a difference."
That's a notion that should be highly encouraging to us all. Because if ever there were a medium fundamentally equipped to empower individuals, it's the one to which you and I have dedicated ourselves.
And I think that one thing we must constantly do in this whirlwind of change is to keep our sights set on that which anchors us – our mission to use the media as a tool for education and growth, for the betterment of individuals and our society.
When I first started my career in public television 13 years ago at WNET, I was shown the video of Edward R. Murrow inaugurating the station, which was then called WNDT. Sitting there before the camera in a basic studio – taped in black and white – Murrow told the audience: "The only thing this channel will sell is the lure of learning; the only product they will push is the node of knowledge."
Today, the behemoth black-and-white cameras have been replaced by miniature HD wonders, and we are sending out multiple digital streams from our automated master controls into the 500-channel universe, but Murrow's eloquent words still guide us. Even as the technological future comes rushing at us at dizzying speed, our traditional mission, half a century old, is the constant star by which we continue to set our course.
So our task now is to take our essential, vital mission and carry it into this electric future taking shape around us… because, frankly, no one else out there is going to do it.
Sunday, December 6, 2009