Public TV: NETwork at Last

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For 14 years, the industry joke goes, National Educational Television has been little more than a pony-express system, delivering its programs by stages. Beginning next week, NET will leave the horseback era and become almost a network, broadcasting programs simultaneously across the nation for two hours, five nights a week.

In the past, taped NET programs were airmailed from a duplication and distribution center in Ann Arbor, Mich., to the first group of the 148 public-TV stations on the list. After the first channels had aired the show, they would mail it to the second group of stations. By the time the show reached the final stations on the list, the delay might be as long as nine weeks. As a result, NET documentaries tended to lack immediacy when they were not totally out of date.

NET went the slow route simply because it could not afford the broadcast tieline charge. An A. T. & T. link-up for ten hours of weekly programming costs roughly $450,000 a month, or about three-quarters of NET's total monthly budget. But in 1967, Congress passed a law that 1) permitted the telephone system to cut the rate drastically for educational channels and 2) established a Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help pay it.

The network's Sunday offering, as in the past, will be Public Broadcast Laboratory's weekly program. Monday is NET Journal, or documentary night. Tuesday will see NET Festival, a first-rate cultural series. Wednesday will be split among the monthly consumer series (Your Dollar's Worth), biweekly news backgrounders by New York Times staffers and various science programs. Thursday will feature NET Playhouse, a showcase for new U.S. playwrights and BBC productions. Extra time periods will be filled by specials, repeats and regional programming.