A new media spinout provides streaming apps for public service broadcasters. I just wish it was open.

Link: Cascade PBS launches Local Public as standalone streaming tech company, by Matthew Keys at The Desk

I’ve got some complicated feelings about this announcement from Cascade PBS:

“Cascade PBS, the non-profit television station serving western Washington state, has spun out its technology division into a separate company that will help similar public broadcasters carve out their own streaming and digital identities.

The new company, Local Public, will help develop streaming applications for connected TVs, mobile devices and the web, allowing public television stations to offer locally branded streaming experiences featuring their own programming alongside national PBS content.”

On one hand, I absolutely love that they were able to spin out their technology division. Most public media companies don’t have the resources or skills to build their own tech, and building this capability outside of any one station so that all of them can take advantage of it makes a lot of sense to me.

The Local Public site itself also makes the ROI transparent. WETA, the public media station for Greater Washington, ran the numbers and said that it would break even in the first year, and a calculator is available for other stations that want to check for themselves. The pricing hinges on Passport-eligible donors: those giving at least $60 a year. Local Public charges $60,000 a year for stations with fewer than 15,000, $75,000 for up to 40,000, and $100,000 a year for everyone else — which is not out of bounds. It all seems like a decent business, run in the public interest as a subsidiary of Cascade PBS, that will genuinely help public media stations. I want to see more of this.

But I do wish it was fully based on open technology. While stations gain the right to modify the source code of their apps after a year, they remain locked into Local Public’s back-end services. For the CMS, which builds network effects the more stations use it, stations can only get support, maintenance, and customization through Local Public. Over time, that lock-in does not incentivize great support, and Local Public will need to work hard to buck the trends. NPR’s CMS, for example, is notorious among the stations that have to use it. I’m certain the will is there to do better, but they will need to proceed with intention. In my opinion it would be better if, at least after establishing a customer base, they open sourced their back-end CMS too.

I tend to think that any technology provided to support the public interest should be fully open. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tidy business available to its creator — ask Ghost, which is generating millions of dollars off the back of its open source CMS. If there’s a class of organization that absolutely doesn’t deserve to be locked into a technology stack, it’s public service broadcasters.

This isn’t Cascade PBS’s fault. It needs its spinout to be sustainable, and this model feels like it will hit that goal. The best scenario, in my mind, would be if there were central funders who bankrolled open tech that the whole ecosystem could use. But, of course, it’s 2026, and central funding for anything public media is hard to come by.

Still, this is wonderful to see, and anything that encourages collaboration on a technical level between public service media organizations deserves support.