Inside a 19th-century building in Prague, in a small studio, the year-old Nova TV houses the sets of its first sitcom. The presence of comedy here couldn't seem more paradoxical, given the place's past. Or as the network's director general, Vladimir Zelezny, a compact man in natty bow tie and tweed jacket, relates it: "On August 21, 1968, I was arrested here for clandestine, illegal broadcasts against the Russian invasion. I was supposed to be executed in the courtyard." The soldiers positioned Zelezny and his colleagues with their hands up against the wall. They cocked their rifles. "A Russian lieutenant came in," says Zelezny, "and said there was an order that they must destroy the equipment and stop the broadcasting here, but they must not kill us. It was a very difficult moment in my life."
The name for the sitcom, the Novaks, is a play on the station's moniker and the most common Czech last name. The Novaks will be "normal television, plain vanilla television," television aimed at the "lowest common denominator to satisfy the needs of ordinary people without becoming too stupid," Zelezny says. "We will not provide them with intellectual television because we are a station that is part of this so-called mass culture, and we are helping create this mass culture that we believe is part of the culture of every country."
Zelezny is happy - ecstatic even - to be working in a place that calls up such frightening memories, happy to create new television in a country that no longer needs the clandestine. Nova, the first private national TV network in a country with 3.7 million TV households, is a leader in a media revolution sweeping the former Communist states.
Within nine months of signing on in February 1994, Nova's audience share topped 63.5 percent, while at CT1 (Czech Television's main channel, which relies on US$65 million a year from public sources), the audience dwindled to 28.3 percent. Czech viewers are drawn to Nova by innovations Westerners take for granted: live shots from trucks, a male-and-female anchor team, and the startling view - to the Czechs - of the newsroom behind the anchors. Nova's news is faster, snappier, looser, with an emphasis on murders, car wrecks, and fires. One show featured coverage of the trial of a bounty hunter who got his man - and killed him. The piece included a lingering shot of the man's body lying in the center of the road where it had been pulled from a car.
Nova TV has had its failures. The station launched a 10 p.m. Nightline-style late interview show, but it was pulled from the schedule after five months because of its weak ratings. Its demise illustrates a salient point: the news may be prestigious, but after decades of waiting, viewers in the Czech Republic really want to be entertained. Nova's schedule is chock-full of imported entertainment programming, much of it American: Guiding Light, Dynasty, M*A*S*H.
Sixty-six percent of Nova TV is owned by CME, a company founded to invest in Central European media by Ronald Lauder, the son of cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder and a former US ambassador to Austria. Lauder took CME public late in 1994, raising US$71 million with the sale of 5.4 million shares.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, commercial channels, cable networks, and radio stations have sprung up all over the ex-Soviet bloc. Premiera TV, a Prague-only station, is moving to gain frequencies in the rest of the country, to create a network that will reach at least 50 percent of the population. Satellite dishes are no longer a rare sight in Prague: they catch the German- and English-language channels from the Astra satellite system. Time Warner has moved into Prague with HBO Czech, a pay-movie service, as well as an entertainment channel and children's channel. All three are available on Prague's 10 cable systems.
Now Nova has been granted a license for a satellite service. Zelezny is busy weighing his options. About 96 percent of Czech satellite dishes point at the high-powered Astra satellites, but transponders on that platform run as high as $5 million or $6 million each. Pick any another satellite and you're offering the service to a tiny audience. He says he'll come up with an answer. "We do not underestimate competition," Zelezny says. "We will be more than one step ahead." Bet on it.
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