Public TV Boards Face High-Tech Future : Communications: Three agencies address shrinking funds, cable competition and benefits of working together.

Bolstered by new leadership and a new spirit of cooperation, leaders of the three groups that oversee public television agreed this week to work to reduce its bloated bureaucracy, but backed away from a controversial plan that would have eliminated more than a third of the nation’s 350 non-commercial TV stations.

The unusual Thursday and Friday meetings of the boards of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public Broadcasting Service and the Association of America’s Public TV Stations were arranged to find ways to deal with dwindling corporate contributions to public TV and the specter of the burgeoning cable industry siphoning off public-television’s high-brow video franchise.

Officials had said they were studying options ranging from scaling back the number of public TV stations to 200, to transforming PBS into a high-tech distribution service able to send as many as 60 video channels through a new satellite to be launched this month.

But officials of public television, who on Wednesday chose Federal Communications Commissioner Ervin S. Duggan as the new PBS president, backed away from making any sweeping decisions.

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To deal with a drop of more than 13% in corporate contributions last fiscal year, public-TV officials agreed to “look into ways to use the federal appropriation as an incentive for stations to . . . examine (ways to reduce) certain technical and administrative functions duplicated” in some television markets with multiple public TV stations.

Officials also said they would work to gain more comprehensive rights to public-TV programs so they could later benefit financially from the shows by repackaging them on video or on interactive computer discs.

This week’s meetings were among the few occasions that members of CPB, the nonprofit agency that funnels federal appropriations to public broadcasters, have sat down with both the PBS board and officials of AAPTV, the Washington-based trade group that represents public TV stations.

“The most heartening aspect of the whole process is the unity that emerged,” CPB board chairwoman Sheila Tate said in an interview Friday following the meetings.

“I’ve been in public broadcasting for seven years and this is the most unified I’ve seen the system,” Tate said. “The political suspicion and personality clashes--they’re all gone now” with the selection of new leadership.

Still looming, however, is a steep learning curve for some board members struggling to reconcile public television’s role in a strange new high-tech world of a speedy interactive information highway and 500 or more cable channels.

“They were discussing all of this high-tech information highway stuff,” said CPB board member Vic Gold. “To tell the truth, I really don’t understand it all.”