New York Schools May Lose Free VOD

NY public television stations deadlocked in pricing battle with Discovery Education

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2006

New York educators may no longer receive free video-on-demand (VOD) from their public television stations as of July 1. The service will still be available, however, if schools pay for it themselves.

New York Public Television (NYPT), a consortium of PBS stations that has distributed unitedstreaming, a Web-based video library, to 700 districts free of charge for the last four years recently terminated its agreement with Discovery Education, unitedstreaming's parent company.

NYPT, which pays the licensing fees to distribute the content on its Web sites via unitedstreaming, says it wants to include more educational content—such as the PBS series Nature and NOVA—under its current agreement with Discovery. But Discovery wants those programs to be part of a premium package that schools would pay for separately or which would come at a “prohibitively” higher cost for public television, says Kathleen Rae of channel 13/WNET, one of New York's nine public broadcasting stations.

Public television wanted to negotiate a cheaper price for the added content, but Discovery refused to extend its current agreement while the two sides continued discussions, says Rae. At that point, Rae says, NYPT had no option but to end its agreement with Discovery in late May. At press time, both sides were still trying to hammer out a deal.

Discovery Education's Ron Reed says unitedstreaming will be available at an annual cost of $1,995 for high schools and $1,495 for elementary schools. Unitedstreaming offers more than 3,000 educational videos to every K–12 school in New York for streaming or downloading over the Internet..