After uncertain start, Public Media Infrastructure charts a path forward

With the legal dispute between CPB and NPR over the future of public radio interconnection settled, leaders of Public Media Infrastructure say they’re open to collaborating with the Public Radio Satellite System.

In an interview, PMI Interim Executive Director Bob Kempf said the channels of communication between NPR and the individual founders of PMI as well as PMI itself are “wide open.”

“There’s a recognition [that] there’s plenty of work to go around,” he added. 

PMI is tackling that work after navigating a precarious launch. In July, CPB issued a request for proposals for a new entity to manage radio broadcast and digital content distribution for public radio. CPB then awarded a grant to PMI in September for $57.9 million over five years. That included funds to subcontract PRSS for satellite distribution services. PMI’s founding partner organizations are American Public Media Group, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, New York Public Radio, PRX and the Station Resource Group.

The same day CPB announced the PMI grant, NPR attempted to block it by filing a temporary restraining order against the funder. NPR and CPB settled the dispute in November, and CPB agreed to fund PRSS, which is managed by NPR’s distribution division, with $36 million over five years. PMI will instead receive $47 million over five years from CPB.

“In a post-CPB, post-subsidy environment, the husbanding of resources is going to be critical,” said Bill Davis, principal of SRG. “So wherever possible, we want to collaborate. And if we can’t collaborate, then we want to cooperate.” 

“There will be full-on competition at times,” Davis added. “Where those play out is still entirely TBD.”

Collaboration between the organizations will be needed for functions such as emergency alerts, according to NFCB CEO Rima Dael. 

PMI will be “exploring what it looks like to be delivering emergency alerts, Amber Alerts, missing and endangered people alerts, also through the digital infrastructure that we’re going to build,” she said. “But resources to do that, that Congress has and that can also be passed on to individual states and stations — that’s where we will absolutely need to collaborate.”

“PMI at its core, especially for NFCB stations, is not an ‘or’ scenario [between] PMI or PRSS,” she added. “This is a scenario where PMI can work with PRSS to give options broadly to a lot of the stations across the country that are the last-mile connectors for their community.”

First steps

Now that satellite distribution is no longer part of PMI’s mandate, it will focus on offering systemwide digital distribution and creating tools for revenue generation and data analytics.

Among the organization’s first steps was finalizing a contract earlier this month with PRX to provide its Dovetail podcast platform and PRX Exchange, which supports digital distribution of radio programs, to stations for free. More than 60 stations currently use Dovetail to support more than 400 station podcasts, and hundreds use PRX Exchange, according to David Cotrone, PRX’s director of public relations and communications.

The goal is to provide services to public radio stations for no cost for at least the five-year term of the CPB grant, according to Kempf, who has led digital services for NPR and GBH.

PMI’s next major initiative will be to explore and prototype solutions for livestreaming via Internet Protocol in the coming year, Kempf said. 

“For stations, … broadcast technology is still absolutely critical,” Davis said. “But other platforms and the ability to publish simultaneously on multiple platforms and having a digital cloud and fiber infrastructure as opposed to a satellite-based infrastructure was increasingly important.”

He pointed to an FCC plan to auction C-band spectrum, which PRSS uses for satellite distribution. “So we wanted to be forward-looking in providing those kinds of technologies,” Davis said.

An analytics and audience data service for stations is also in the works. While there are already many efforts to track analytics throughout public media, “they’re fragmented and siloed,” Kempf said.

“Coming together in a way to understand a 360 view of audience across platforms is where we’ll be headed with an analytics service,” he said.

Kempf said the service will go beyond providing data and analytics to stations. PMI’s budget includes funds for one or more analysts.

“We need to be able to understand and interpret data and further provide integrations with other systems that are set up to drive monetization,” Kempf said.

When it comes to analyzing “what’s most effective in terms of both providing service and then monetizing that service,” public media is underperforming, Davis said.

“So the ability to do that and to do that in something that gets closer to real time, so that if there are messages around fundraising or around news or around music that have resonated in a particular community, that station can then share that information with their peers in something that would be much more immediate than the delay that we have with the traditional broadcast data,” he said.

PMI is still considering how to administer IP livestreaming and analytics services. “Those could be subcontracted or managed directly by PMI or a combination of the two,” Kempf said.

Some of the digital tools and infrastructure that PMI hopes to scale to the public radio system have not yet been identified, he said, but “there’s plenty of digital product and digital paths for content and audience engagement that we’ll be looking to explore over the coming years. So we’re just getting started.”

Help for small stations

For NFCB stations, “the most important thing” is that the services are free, Dael said.

“Hopefully, the services that we give you will also generate more revenue for your station,” she said. “And that’s an important through line that PMI is looking to bring to the entire public media system.” 

Funds will be set aside to “handhold” all-volunteer and small stations in areas such as backup service, Dael said. 

“AM and FM radio is still the plan B civic infrastructure for the entire country,” she said. “And so that’s not going to go away. But are there options, though, for small stations in these kinds of towns that can use other kinds of technology to connect?”

For instance, when PMI begins offering internet-based live broadcast services, it will work with stations in rural areas that might not have strong internet to find alternatives. 

“Do you have strong 5G? Do you maybe have the possibility to have a Wi-Fi connection, but if it’s unreliable, you automatically fail over to 5G if internet fails?” Kempf said. “What’s the most cost-effective way to do that for you? We’ll help you put those services in place to solve what we call … that last mile of track delivery problem.”

Looking beyond CPB support

While PMI is working to offer more tools for stations, it is also in the process of setting up its own governance structure. It is operating under the former Public Radio International 501(c)(3), which PRX acquired as part of a merger with PRI in 2018. The two organizations maintained their brands until PRX dropped the PRI brand in 2019.

“We did not want to have to go through the process of standing up a new 501(c)(3),” Davis said. “And we were fortunate that PRX had maintained [PRI] as a separate 501(c)(3) and they were willing to make that transfer.”

PMI’s board consists of a member from each founding organization. PMI is in the process of setting up its bylaws and will select a nominating committee to help expand the board over the first six months of next year. The expanded board will include five station leaders and three independent members, according to Davis. 

In addition to having a seat on the board, each partner organization is contractually obligated to provide in-kind support to PMI, Dael said. Cotrone is providing communications support to PMI, for instance. 

PMI plans to name a permanent executive director in early 2026, according to Cotrone.

The organization is also planning how it will continue beyond the end of the five-year CPB grant. It has begun conversations with consultants “to help stand up our fundraising capabilities,” Kempf said. 

“Philanthropy, grants … is going to be core to what PMI does going forward,” he said. He also expects some revenue to come from services such as podcast advertising, which will take a percentage of the revenue as an administrative fee. 

But the goal is to avoid moving from free services for stations to paid when the grants ends “if possible,” Kempf added. 

Some services could eventually require user fees, “but that’s going to be at the bottom tier, and we want to keep those user fees as low as we can because our coalition is really large,” Davis said. “… If we were just looking at a user fee model to envision our future business, that probably isn’t going to be sustainable.”