‘Maniacs’ on TV Wake Up Poland : Culture: As the nation loosens up, fledgling operation could be the vanguard in a new era of information and entertainment.

The future of private television in the Eastern Bloc is here on the 11th floor of a student dormitory, in a windowless janitor’s room where three wall calendars depict Polish women in various stages of undress.

As far as hardware is concerned, there is not much else in the broadcast center of Echo TV-Channel 28 to catch the eye. The electronics are unimpressive: a living-room videocassette recorder, a Commodore computer keyboard on loan from a Wroclaw teen-ager, a homemade transmitter with the main broadcast cable snaking up to a rooftop antenna through a wall vent.

The total cash investment in the first private television station in Eastern Europe comes to a whopping $15,000.

“People who know television have come here and told us that only maniacs could use this kind of equipment,” said Henryk Pacha, one of the eight founders of Echo TV, which went on the air in mid-February.

But in the duller-than-dull world of Communist-bred television, where apparatchiks have stupefied the masses for decades with documentaries about tractors in pursuit of five-year plans, the future may well belong to maniacs willing to broadcast from dormitory closets.

For on a recent weekday evening, when Polish state television Channel 1 was airing a talking-head panel program about business problems, Echo TV was building its growing audience--estimated at 700,000 in this city in southwestern Poland--with 1 1/2 hours of commercial-free MTV rock videos, along with other material pirated from satellites.

The private station followed up with a brief business show of its own, then segued into coverage of European soccer, a Polish passion. State television, meanwhile, droned on with another talking head, the minister of labor illuminating the economic situation. Echo TV settled in for prime time with an American car-chase movie called “Police Special.” As the evening’s programming drew to an end, cops busted bad guys on Echo TV while state television treated viewers to a Russian-language lesson.

“We definitely can fill gaps that Polish television creates,” said Pacha, who made his career as an announcer on state television in Wroclaw. “We think we are going to make money. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”

Although there are no Nielsen ratings, there are signs that Wroclawians are tuning in Echo TV. Shortly after the station started broadcasting, virtually everything resembling a television antenna in Wroclaw was sold out of the shops. An usually large number of people have been spotted dragging wires around on their roofs. (To receive the station you either have to swivel your old antenna or rig a new one.)

Back in Warsaw, the Polish capital, state television is in trouble. Not only is it often boring, but many viewers continue to regard it as a morally bankrupt holdover from a Communist government that in 1981 imposed martial law, fired scores of journalists and required all others to “verify” their loyalty.

Since Solidarity took over the government last fall, a gradual effort has been made to spruce up this image. One-third of the managers and directors of television have been replaced and a full reorganization is coming in the spring.

At the same time, the money-strapped Solidarity government, which is in the throes of radical free-market reforms, is searching for ways to make television pay for itself. An idea has been floated in parliament to sell state television’s Channel 2 to foreigners. This notion reportedly has traumatized the staff at Channel 2. The bureaucracy there is bracing for a fight; protests are being organized.

Meanwhile, at Echo TV in Wroclaw, there is endless room for free-market innovation.

“We are planning to be very flexible in our programming. If, for example, a person decides that he wants to broadcast his wedding, we will do it. Or, to give another example, if a person loses his passport, he could come on our channel and make a personal appeal. We would charge between 50,000 and 100,000 zlotys ($5 to $10),” said Pacha, who has loaned the station the use of his own home video equipment.

The station has 12 employees, 11 of whom work for free. The remaining one, a television technician trained at a state telecommunications institute, said his salary is “what they will give me.” The broadcast power of Echo TV is about 500 times less than Warsaw’s Channel 1. News programming currently amounts to zero minutes per day. Long-range plans envision a five-minute daily news show.

The station’s corporate strategy for technological improvements can be summed up in one word: begging.

“We would like the possibility of getting some outdated equipment from abroad. We have information that such equipment is being thrown out in the United States. They should send it to us and we will fix it,” said Andrzej Zygmunt, director and head of technical services at Echo TV.

Zygmunt, who is in his late thirties, is a can-do kind of guy with a small brown mustache and a big brown briefcase full of screwdrivers and profit-and-loss charts. He may be the only television executive in the world who built the transmitter of the station he directs. He built his first radio at age 10 and has a doctorate in microwave transmission. As a teacher at the Wroclaw Institute of Telecommunications and Acoustics, he has specialized in communication satellites.

It is a satellite dish--Echo TV has one--that so far is the station’s major source of programming, and of potential legal trouble.

“We are profoundly aware that we shouldn’t pirate television programs, although state television does it all the time,” Zygmunt said.

Echo TV rebroadcasts programs without express written permission from MTV, Sky News and the Eurosport Channel. Zygmunt said the station has received “verbal permission” for using MTV and is trying to sign written agreements so it can operate in accord with international regulations.

“With all that has happened politically in Poland, we are a civilized European country again,” he said.

While international broadcast law is a concern for Zygmunt and his colleagues, there is a higher law that the station cannot afford to appear to be violating, at least while the Roman Catholic cardinal of Wroclaw, Henryk Gulbinowicz, is watching.

In Poland, the Catholic Church is a formidable moral and political force. It helped bring down the Communist government, and smart Polish businessmen know it can raise heck with profits.

So, when Zygmunt was getting ready to go on the air with Echo TV early in February and Gulbinowicz called him in for a little chat, the broadcast executive showed up promptly and listened carefully.

“He warned us against spreading pornography and he congratulated us on our station. He said that private television in the West gained viewers through pornography. He said that this may be the simplest and cheapest way, but he expressed the hope that we would not travel down that road,” Zygmunt said.

His station has heeded the cardinal’s warning and not broadcast pornographic films, he said.

But as Echo TV expands its broadcast schedule into the early morning hours, past the bedtime of likely critics, Zygmunt says it probably will put some mildly erotic fare on the air.