National Educational Television - NETA - at last!

I have been dying to have my work get national exposure.  I went to Peru last December because the director of NETA (National Educational Television Assn.) suggested this was the only way I could make my documentary, A Zest for Life, suitable for them to include for broadcast over national educational television.  Well, the trip paid off and NETA has now officially accepted A Zest for Life. 

WOW!

It will take about two months for the documentary to get set up, but then, well, the sky's the limit.

So what is NETA and how does educational television in the United States work?

Let's start at the bottom, where we find public access stations, really great, locally connected television stations who allow almost anyone that walks through the door to put on a TV show - and in many cases, also teach them how to do it.  I say "almost anyone," because many local public access stations do have a residency requirement and things of that sort.

Similar to the public access stations are the television stations run by educational institutions in which the students learn how to make television programs by - making television programs.

Next up is local broadcast above the public access level.  Here, you have professionals but not the cream of the cream professionals.  This will be your local, commercial stations.  They do a lot of local news and local interest programming.

Sticking with educational television but moving on to quite a higher level, you have PBS.  Each individual PBS station can put on, or select, its own programming so long as it fits the national PBS guidelines.  Above that, you have the national educational distributors who distribute not only to PBS stations but also to other educational television networks.

Some of these national distributors pay for all the programming they accept, some pay for only some of it and take the rest free, and some don't pay for any of the programming they accept.  Why would they get free programming?  Because of people like me, who want national exposure but haven't quite gotten to the level of having programming good enough to get paid real money for it.

So that's where I am - national, but not yet paid.

My next goal, of course, it to make something that will not only air nationally but that I will get paid for.  I'm hoping to reach that goal within the next year.  Let's see what happens.