Dutch television has been something of a mess. Until fairly recently, eight non-profit groups representing different religions and ideologies had complete control of the Netherlands' three television stations. None of the groups cooperated with each other; none was concerned with ratings; and all used the air waves to push their own causes.

A typical evening a few years ago might include an American movie (often a decade old), reruns of, say, The Cosby Show, and two separate thirty-minute nightly news programs. One government-funded organization produced all news shows, but each of the eight ideological groups made its own current affairs programs, occasionally on the same issues and airing at the same time. Rarely would programs appear in the same slots from week to week.

But in 1989, the dike finally burst. A slick commercial outside called RTL 4 evaded Dutch regulations against profit-making on the airwaves by beaming in its programs via satellite from nearby Luxembourg. The new station captured the public's fancy and -- for better and worse -- has transformed broadcasting in the Netherlands.

A typical evening on RTL 4 includes a cascade of old favorites: All in the Family, Dallas, Hill Street Blues, and so forth, plus quiz shows, including the popular Wheel of Fortune (in Dutch). News and public affairs offerings are meager, documentaries nonexistent. Low ratings quickly killed one program about Dutch politics.

RTL 4's managing director Ruud Hendriks explained the station's approach back in 1989, when it began operations: "If the public wants cauliflowers each evening, we will give them cauliflowers."

And RTL 4 has aggressively counter-programmed. The most highly watched Dutch news program, NOS Journal, has been consistently losing viewers to an RTL 4 soap opera, Good Times, Bad Times. Overall, RTL 4 now garners as much as 30 percent of this small country's television audience.

Public TV in the Netherlands relies, in part, on advertising revenue, and RTL 4 is siphoning off some of that money. The results? The once-staid public system has been forced to adopt an approach that will mean much less news and more attention to ratings. Meanwhile, over the long term, crisis that may lead either to bankruptcy or to commercialization.

Kees van der Haak, a university professor who doubles as a news station executive, worries that news is "being expelled to very unattractive hours. I am afraid that a lot of quality programs are going to disappear from public broadcasting." But van der Haak also sees positive effects. Public broadcasting, he points out, "has been forced to look at what the public really wants. They used to do their programming with a certain kind of contempt for the viewers." Now, he says, there is more cooperation and efficiency in program production, which leads to better quality in some programs.

The old system was cracking even before RTL 4 arrived on the scene. Many of the controlling groups had begun to produce almost interchangeable fare. Meanwhile, money had become an issue.

After RTL 4 appeared, the Dutch government rescinded the no-profit rule. Last fall, fearing that all advertising revenue for public broadcasting would be lost to RTL 4, the government opened the way for its own commercial station. It is likely that one of the three Dutch public stations will become commercial, while the other two will remain non-profit.

This new direction brings the Netherlands more in line with most other countries in Europe, where over the past decade public broadcasting systems have been replaced or at least challenged by commercial stations. The movement toward a more unified European economic community favors this trend. According to European agreements, no country can keep foreign commercial stations from broadcasting into its territory.

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