Originally published in Current,
Nov. 11, 1996
By Steve Behrens
A stream of pubcasters has emerged from tours of an unmarked building in Scottsdale, Ariz., reacting to what they've seen with both admiration and suspicion.
It was the headquarters of Educational Management Corp.--the advance guard of the private sector, trying to make a new business in K-12 education. EMG puts out 16 satellite channels of instructional video-on-demand for more than 3,000 schools around the country, and is expanding rapidly through a savvy marketing campaign.
The wherewithal comes from EMG's owner, Viacom, a company with 1995 sales of $11.7 billion and a stable of brands including MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, UPN, Discovery Zone and Blockbuster, not to mention EMG's parent and the world's largest educational publisher, Simon & Schuster, with Prentice Hall and Silver Burdett Ginn.
Not surprisingly, EMG goes all-out to earn fees far above any contemplated by public TV's instructional wing. Press reports say the firm sells its video service for $25,000 to $200,000 per school. An EMG spokesperson was not available for comment.
Some parts of EMG's service, like electronic field trips, are becoming standard offerings of public TV; others, like downloaded video clips, have been proposed in public TV but not pursued.
But the Viacom subsidiary has excelled at marketing a broad package of services, flying many dozens of school administrators to Arizona for impressive demonstrations.
EMG and similar private-sector forays pose enough of a challenge to public TV's low-profile, long-standing ITV community that PBS President Ervin Duggan is appointing a task force to consider the field's response. The task force, which will convene in December, will be cochaired by Louisiana ETV chief Beth Courtney and Tom Axtell, g.m. of KLVX in Las Vegas, according to Sandy Welch, PBS executive v.p. for learning services.
"The EMG thing has shaken us because they have come on so fast and so strong," says Welch. "What is significant is that very big companies are putting in tremendous capital to capture the K-12 marketplace. ... This is a wake-up call to the system. We are not the only game in town."
PBS rang the alarm at the Fall Planning Meeting in September [1996] with a report by Pat Tinsley, a Texas entrepreneur whose pioneering Ti-In distance learning network is now owned by K-III Communications, along with the controversial, ad-supported Channel One and the classroom staple Weekly Reader. The topic arose again last month during the SECA Conference in Tampa.
Some pubcasters see EMG as a competitive threat, some as a potential partner and others as a model for what public TV might do.
"I think all of the above are correct," says Axtell, who first became a target and then an admirer of EMG. The manager of the school-board-owned Las Vegas station was startled to learn that five EMG salespeople were working his territory. "It sounded like they were trying to sell their product by attacking our product."
They were studying school budgets, pointing out where funds could be diverted to EMG services, and even helping the school district apply for federal Title I antipoverty grants that would buy EMG services.
In the process, Axtell learned that many in his school system didn't know public TV was already offering some of the services--at no extra charge--that EMG was pitching.
Axtell confronted EMG, took a tour in Scottsdale and the company has since discussed launching more than 10 collaborative ventures with KLVX; five are still under consideration. But EMG also made inroads with the school district, and may benefit from several federal grants as well as a major foundation grant.
Quality has not been an issue with EMG. "I have to say I tremendously admire the quality of the product and the service I've seen thus far from EMG," says Welch.
Georgia PTV remains impressed with EMG's services after three years experience. The state network is buying the whole EMG package for three schools "to see if this is a direction we should go in for development of materials," says Joline Baughman, director of education services. "Our philosophy is that there are a lot of ways to reach children, and we're anxious to try as many as we can."
The state network will also produce a new third-grade science package for the Hughes Galaxy Classroom service now owned by EMG, and is already providing an interactive part of Galaxy: handling and evaluating hundreds of faxes from students across the country.
At one of the sites, Swainsboro H.S. in Swainsboro, Ga., media specialist Judy Bennett says EMG's satellite-delivered service is excellent, concise and exciting to teachers, who can bring images of the wider world into a rural Georgia school. Her school moves six classes a day through its new EMG Solutions learning lab.
The other day, Bennett remembers, students had a math lesson from the top chef at Planet Hollywood about his daily uses of kitchen algebra.
Most of EMG's bad press has come from its expensive marketing efforts. The school system in Baltimore County, Md., dropped a $5 million expansion of EMG services in 1995 after the Baltimore Sun reported that EMG had flown 70 county school employees to Arizona for stays in "four-star hotels." Similar reports raised earlier controversies in Chicago and Tampa/St. Petersburg newspapers.
Seeing a demonstration of the service does seem to sell it, however.
"It's really something to be sitting in a classroom with a teacher, who has sent in a request for five minutes of rain forest stuff, and ... up comes an EMG logo [on a monitor] and the person at EMG looks her right in the eyes and says, 'So, Barbara, did you know we have five different choices, and can feed you all of them? You'll need a 40-minute tape,'" says Chuck Allen, president of KAET in Phoenix. The teacher is won over.
Teachers use what EMG calls "the Now Channel" to place orders for video segments, which can be downloaded by the next day. EMG owns full rights to its clips, and the schools can use them forever after downlinking them. If the company doesn't have the desired topic in its library, it may assign a crew to shoot it within a few weeks. EMG also arranges frequent live satellite interviews and electronic field trips.
EMG's founder is a onetime Illinois school superintendent named Gail Richardson, who spoke via videotape at the SECA Conference. A charming talker, he alluded to his childhood stuttering and his indebtedness to a great teacher who helped him overcome it. Today, for the first time, Richardson said, schools "have the opportunity to offer these great teachers to more people."
Chuck Allen calls Richardson "one of the great entrepreneurs in education."
Richardson founded a daycare chain, La Petite Academy, in 1969 and sold it in 1970; founded Prescription Learning Corp. in 1975 and sold it to Jostens Learning in 1986; founded EMG in 1988, sold it to Simon & Schuster in 1995.
He stayed with EMG, but now he's talking about leaving to start something new, says Allen. "I think the big question is what is the company going to be like after Gail's gone. ... This guy--in my opinion only--is the company. ... His enthusiasm, the trust people place in him, is the magic carpet that this place is flying on."
Though he qualifies as some sort of visionary, Richardson was not the only person to imagine a system like the one EMG is now selling.
"Essentially, he's done a lot of the things Howard talked about," says Chuck Allen.
This "Howard" is Howard Miller, the now-retired top technologist and senior v.p. at PBS, who stood beside a rack of equipment at a PBS annual meeting two years ago and described how PBS was going to take orders for video clips from schoolteachers and download them by the next day. He even ordered a big Pioneer optical disc changer to store up to 1,000 hours of "near-on-demand" video, ready to be called up by a computer.
Miller's plan was cheaper to operate than EMG's--employing an online catalog instead of a phone-answering crew--but never went anywhere. Pioneer ran into technical problems and didn't develop the disc changer. It would also have required a vast effort to negotiate rights with dozens of instructional program producers, says Welch. The project lost its champion when Miller retired in 1995.
"Howard's ability to dream stuff up was probably far in advance of anyone to design it and manufacture it," says Allen. "The ITV community wasn't prepared to want it at that time."
"Frankly, we never quite figured it out," says Welch. PBS not only lacked the capital to get started, but was also distracted by the federal funding crisis, she says.
One of the simplest and most important features of Miller's plan, and also EMG's, is cutting video segments to the right size for teachers' classroom needs.
"I talked to a lot of teachers about that," says Miller. "Their biggest complaint was that most of the programming we had was ... too long. They didn't intend to allow the program to displace them as teachers."
Tom Brown, who is being wooed by EMG in his role as assistant schools superintendent for Grosse Isle, Mich., is glad to see that the company assumed the work that he remembers doing as a teacher--laboriously finding the segments on a videotape that he wanted his students to see.
EMG designs video material "only as long as it needs to be," says veteran ITV producer Bill Barnhart. "For that I say, 'Yippee!'" In contrast, public TV's ITV services typically have been blocked into series of 15-minute programs so that they can be scheduled for broadcast.
Format is only one of the issues for the PBS K-12 task force.
"Although we have an educational heritage," says Axtell, "our efforts in K-12 have been overshadowed by our need to fund the [PBS] National Program Schedule." If public TV wants to provide K-12 services, he says, it will have to make a priority of designing new products to meet teachers' specs.
Outside link: Viacom's corporate home page.
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