Plus: A consortium plans an initiative for Latino pubmedia professionals, and a PBS Digital Studios star takes a friendly quiz.

Idea Channel, PRX Remix and Religion & Ethics Newsweekly are among the winners.

PBS’s fiscal year 2015 draft budget includes the launch of a Membership Video on Demand service that will generate revenue by drawing on the network’s expansive library of content. MVOD members will get exclusive access to on-demand PBS videos, according to a budget document acquired by Current. “This is a critical product to help stations drive membership of the growing digital audience,” it said. The service will be integrated with PBS’s COVE video platform, and the public broadcaster anticipates hiring additional staff for the project. The budget proposal, now awaiting comment from stations, also requests a 2.5 percent increase in assessments from stations.

Plus: A columnist sounds off on Slate's pubmedia-esque membership program, and NPR unearths its Internet beginnings.

A host's departure led to an overhaul of the long-running show and competition among producers for the vacant seat.

Plus: Another online TV service advertises access to PBS.

The handling of plagiarism charges at New Mexico’s KUNM-FM drew criticism from CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan, who weighed in on the issue in an April 24 report. The charges were first made public by former KUNM reporter Tristan Ahtone, who left the Albuquerque station in March over what he cited as the station’s failure to respond to a fellow reporter’s plagiarism, as recounted in an April 15 story in the Santa Fe Reporter. In an email to his superiors at KUNM that a Santa Fe journalist later forwarded to Kaplan, Ahtone accused KUNM leadership of hiding three instances of suspected plagiarism from listeners.

Pubmedia consulting company Public Radio Capital has rebranded as Public Media Company and announced a pair of upcoming projects that reflect its desire to expand its client base. The 12-year-old Denver-based operation announced the name change April 22, along with a website redesign. Public Media Company will also grow its operations with Channel X, an online marketplace for public media video content, and the Public Media Database, a performance-metric platform for stations. “The scope of our work has broadened pretty dramatically,” said CEO Marc Hand. Public Media Company had been working with joint licensees and pubTV stations for years before its name change.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — CPB’s Board of Directors unanimously approved a resolution Thursday urging the FCC to avoid allowing “white areas” that would lack public television coverage after the upcoming spectrum auction and channel repacking. The resolution followed a meeting Tuesday in which network broadcasters and CPB management met with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to discuss the auction, set for mid-2015. It will clear bandwidth to be used by the burgeoning number of wireless devices. Television broadcasters face three choices: sell spectrum and get out of broadcasting, sell a portion of spectrum and share a channel with another broadcaster, or opt out of the auction.

Iowa’s Board of Regents voted to increase funding for Iowa Public Radio Thursday after hearing details of the pubcaster’s financial struggles in the wake of a CEO’s departure. The seven regents unanimously agreed to boost IPR’s fiscal year 2015 funding by $236,000. The decision restores support from the state universities to its FY2013 level of $944,800, almost a quarter of IPR’s total revenues that year. IPR, comprising six stations licensed to three public universities, has been adjusting to reduced subsidies from the schools, which have scaled back aid by 10 percent each year since 2011. IPR aims to be free of university funding in 2017.

Plus: PBS virtually recreates D-Day, and the latest on the fight over podcasting patents.

The two nonprofit newsrooms will split a $1.2 million grant from the foundation over two years.

How We Got to Now, a fall PBS series charting the history of innovation, will accompany a stand-alone news and commentary website funded by the Knight Foundation.

With contract negotiations looming this fall, leaders at NPR member stations are getting increasingly vocal about what they see as shortcomings of the products offered by NPR Digital Services. In 2011, NPR leaders convinced the majority of stations large and small to sign a three-year agreement for the newly formed unit to provide a fixed slate of tools and services for online streaming, website design and donation management. With the contract term ending Sept. 30, station leaders are raising questions and concerns about the offerings and whether to renew the contract as-is. A recent informal survey of heads of 30 stations gathered mixed reviews of the package of technology tools and services designed to help stations distribute and publish news reports and other online content.