Someone’s been anticipating the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. My local PBS station, KOCE, has turned itself into a streaming service. For free, you get the major PBS weeknight programs, with the exception of Masterpiece, plus some of the early childhood programming on Saturday morning and weekday afternoons. (Netflix now owns Sesame Street, sold by Nickelodeon. This digs into the pro-PBS line that “Only public television can make a Sesame Street,” although Nickelodeon dumped it because… only public television can make a Sesame Street.) You probably also get the old “distance education telecourses” familiar to a pre-1990s cohort. For $60/year, you get the deep catalogue of public television. I am sure a lot will be missing on inspection, and I’ll be curious, but it seems largely true. If KOCE truly becomes a streaming service and sells its broadcast license, a lot of items related to physical television can be cut, and I think they are part of what CPB paid for.

The larger question is whether people will donate above and beyond the $60 once they have gotten their money’s worth. Part of the subscription ethos is “providing programming for everyone,” including people in hard circumstances. Now that’s gone. We have a two-tier systems, like it or not. I suppose a further innovation would be still running pledge drives on the $60 paid tier, but then, for $1,000 a year, offer a pledge-break-free experience. That’s the difficulty with having tiers; you have to make existence less pleasant so that you feel the need to upgrade to the next tier. (For example, buying the cheapest airline seats often means boarding last with the “unworthy poor” and paying the baggage fees. For $50 more, I get incrementally greater comfort and less “wealth policing.”) I guess that KOCE thinks the quantity of $60 subscriptions will give them their margin. Perhaps. Good luck to them.