THE END OF PRIVATE TELEVISION IN GUYANA IS NEAR

Feb 21, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The government had long announced that a channel would be licensed to broadcast religious programs. Given the large number of religious bodies in Guyana and the financial health of most of these groupings, there were bound to be applications by most of these religious bodies for broadcast licenses.
If every religious grouping had to be given a license, the government would probably end up granting about 50 licenses, most of which would probably end up being closed after the first six months because they would simply be unable to muster the advertising and other revenue flows to keep their individual stations afloat.
The government has therefore done the logical thing. It has agreed to a single channel which would allow all the religious bodies to broadcast to a Guyanese audience. One religious channel makes sense in a market of limited size.
But despite the obvious financial benefit, two major criticisms are likely to greet the decision of the government to approve a license for this inter-religious channel. (So far no license has been granted but it obviously will be soon).
The principal objections will be that broadcast licenses have not yet been liberalized and therefore the government is circumventing its own commitment not to grant any licenses until the sector is liberalized through the passage of broadcast legislation. This decision has been ruled unconstitutional by the courts which ordered that licenses be considered. The government has appealed the judgment of the court.
A few months ago, when the government announced that it would be dedicating a channel strictly to education, there were no criticisms of this decision. No one suggested that this should not be done until broadcast legislation is passed. And why? Because they did not feel threatened. After all, this educational channel would not pose a commercial threat to any of the other channels.
But a religious channel will. Any religious channel will pose a major threat to the other channels because it means that most of them which gain their revenue from broadcasting religious programs will lose their critical source of revenue. And it will bankrupt them.
But even if it does not, what will happen is that they will also lose advertising revenue because there will be a shift in advertising from the normal channels to the religious channel since this channel is bound to be the most watched in Guyana.
The government played a masterstroke when it announced that it would be establishing an educational channel. It succeeded when there was no criticism of this intention.
Thus it has now gone a step further and indicated that it would now be establishing a religious channel. Since there were no criticisms of an educational channel, there ought to be none when it comes to a religious channel. Wrong!
The people as a whole are not going to be against the establishment of either an educational or religious channel. Why should they be? But there are now going to dissent from media houses when it comes to the religious channel because the financial interests of these media houses will be directly affected.
But the government has the upper hand because it will point to the non- opposition to the proposal for educational channel and ask why then the opposition to a religious channel.
The television stations are now looking down the barrel of financial ruin in the years ahead. There is no way any channel in Guyana, except the state-owned NCN, can compete with the religious channel when it comes to market audience and to financial viability.
NCN will survive because it still enjoys government support and has the resources to buy rights to overseas programming such as cricket and football, the rebroadcast of which allows it to garner advertising revenue.
What is happening here is a rerun of what happened years ago with the independent dailies when they lost advertising revenue because of the withdrawal of government ads. While there are no government ads involved in the case of the proposed establishment of an inter-religious channel, the effects are going to be the same. The private stations are going to go under and what we will end up having in the long run will be a state-owned channel, the religious channel, the educational channel, and possibly one private television channel which can afford to run at a loss for a long time.
Then the cable operators will take over. They will buy rights to the educational and religious channels and therefore be able to attract a wider audience.
The present crop of private television stations will become insolvent while the cable guys will smile all the way to the bank in the future.
And guess what, there is nothing you or I or the private TV companies can do about it because no one bothered to protest when it was announced that there would be an educational channel. But then again we probably never envisaged what would have been the outcome.

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