02. 03. 2005

KOJADINOVIC ANNOUNCED RTS SUBSCRIPTION

BELGRADE, March 2, 2005 – Serbian Culture Minister Dragan Kojadinovic told the media yesterday that the budget for Radio Television of Serbia was entirely independent and just “leaning” to the Ministry of Culture, “not affecting budgets of any other cultural institutions and their programs”. At the press conference marking the anniversary of the Serbian government work, Kojadinovic said that the budget of the national television has been cut from last year’s 3,2 billion of dinars to 2,5 billion. The reason for budget cut was, as Kojadinovic stated, the expected implementation of subscription fees”. According to him, “the Ministry of Culture and media will launch in the next couple of days the initiative for implementation of the Broadcast Act with regard to the RTS subscription”. “The subscriptions are usually utterly unpopular. The politicians and political parties always tend to avoid the subscription, but the time has come when all that is used must be paid for, especially when public service is in question. The subscription is something that exists in this country for many years now, through pay-TV cable systems, and no one objects to that”, Kojadinovic said.