(static crackling)
(dreamy music)
- I'm Gwen Ifill on PBS.
- [Kristen] PBS, growing up,
just brought happiness to my home.
♪ It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood ♪
- "Reading Rainbow," I learned my ABCs,
all the songs, you know?
♪ What would you do ♪
You know, all those things that create those moments,
now I have those to then pass along.
- The word public means it's for everyone.
It's not just one part of America.
For the last 50 years,
PBS's mission has been serving everyone,
no matter what your means are.
- Public media is truly for the people,
of the people, by the people, right?
(uplifting music)
- If you think about the very beginning, from Fred Rogers,
those shows were trying to help kids understand
how they fit into the community.
And so we have stations all throughout the country
who are thinking about what their communities most need.
- If it's gonna help the community,
then let's lock arms and let's do this together.
The event tonight is,
we have parents come in from the community, with their kids.
- Oh my goodness!
- Hey! (Kristen screaming)
- And we have opportunities to really have
what I call real thoughtful conversations with parents
so we get a better feel for what PBS programs
and PBS curriculum they need.
We want them to make four faces on this sheet.
But that can be tricky sometimes
because technology is moving at a rapid pace, right?
And so the fear for some
was that you're creating a digital divide.
In Arkansas, some of our rural communities
don't have that connectivity.
- But also, in households of kids,
the kids get the hand-me-down device
that's a few generations old.
So the challenge became, how do we stay true to our mission
and continue to truly reach the public?
AWS was the partner that helped us figure out
how to bring 300 local stations onto a single platform
and work on any device.
- [Karen] You can watch us on your phone.
You can watch on your standard TV.
- And that was a very deliberate choice on our part.
It made it much more complicated to build,
but it meant that we could be very accessible
to the whole population.
- [Karen] Wow!
Good job today.
- Yes.
- Good job.
Our kids can't jump on the metro
and go to the library or go to the museum.
So we always keep that on our mind,
of how do we give them quality resources?
How do we give them amazing experiences
that's built on excellence and quality?
(children chattering)
- And so there's an ownership piece
that every American, I think, feels.
This is my station. This is my network.
- I think PBS, they're like this beacon, this, like, tower.
- [Karen] I think 99% of the state now can view us.
- Their goal is to reach.
Their goal is to not stop until you reach every person.
- With public media,
our resources are very constrained and limited.
So working with AWS and cloud enabled us
to actually cheaply reach scale.
And there's this infinite shelf space for digital.
And so I do believe that this library can continue to grow.
- Television can be an incredibly powerful medium,
but it really is just one way.
Our Games app, for example,
we've built it so that kids, when they have Wi-Fi,
can choose the games that they wanna download within it.
And then when they're out of Wi-Fi,
they have all those games to play with.
And it worked without a hitch.
Kids were still able to play games without delays
or without lags because that infrastructure was in place
to really help them access it.
- We help parents and kids see possibilities.
We help expose them to culture and learning
that they may not have in their communities.
- We wanna open up those different worlds to kids
while also helping them see themselves reflected.
- If you help them shape how they see themselves,
you are really helping them to shape their world
and how they can fearlessly march out
and start an amazing life.
- It happened for me.
When I was exposed to something different,
I wanted something different.
That opens your heart,
and it gives you a sense of something inside of you
that says, "There is more."
We have digital platforms.
We have every single thing we need just at our fingertips.
And that just is a testament of the culture of PBS,
that they wouldn't stop
until every kid had a chance to learn.
No matter where you live, you can get it too.