ORF faces competish
All changed in Austria
Monika Lindner, former director of lower Austria's regional ORF station, shattered the men's club atmosphere at ORF by becoming the first woman appointed to the top post on Jan. 2.
Lindner succeeded Gerhard Weis, beating candidates including Weis for another try, Austrian newspaper publisher Peter Rabl and Kirch Media's Jan Mojto.
Lindner has been with ORF since 1974 and previously led one of the web's regional studios.
Under her predecessor, ORF adapted to the coming commercial TV threat by creating separate identities for its two channels. ORF1 became a youth-skewed channel, while ORF2 was aimed at an upscale older audience, concentrating on news, documentaries and the arts.
The result gave ORF a 50% share of the market, fighting off popular commercial channels from neighboring Germany that are received by 80% of Austrian households.
Lindner wants to return ORF to its public-service roots -- which means it could lose viewers again.
Now the pubcaster faces its greatest challenge: Austria TV, a Euro-backed media player, won the frequency license for the country's first commercial terrestrial station Feb. 1.
ATV's largest shareholder, with 33%, is Teutonic media owner Herbert Kloiber through his production-distribution companies Tele Munchen and Concorde. Other shareholders include pan-Euro station group SBS and Dutch-based UPC, a unit of U.S. cable broker UnitedGlobalCom.
Broadcast authority KommAustria chose from among seven candidates who bid in November.
Unlike its rivals, ATV has been on air as an all-Austrian cable programmer since January 2000, but its reach was limited to 1 million households.
"With the start of ATV over the air, Austrians for the first time have the choice between two providers," ATV's managing director Tillmann Fuchs says.
(Christian Kohl in Cologne contributed to this report.)
