We’ve blogged before about the recent success of Piano Media‘s national paywalls in Slovakia and Slovenia, which allow subscribers to get seamless access to most of the country’s news outlets. Here’s an interview with Piano Media’s CEO Tomas Bella, conducted by Bill Baker, President Emeritus of Channel Thirteen/WNET, the PBS affiliate in New York. In this brief video, Baker asks Bella how the system works and what makes it unique.”It works pretty similar to the cable TV Model, where … you can put a subscription to the site for roughly 3, 4, 5 euros per month,” Bellas explains. “And when you buy it, you automatically get access to all the major print media in the country and to all the content.”When asked if he had any trouble getting subscribers, Bella responded: “You will have one group of people who understand the value of content, who understand the need for work and so on, so they will sign up immediately, before they know what is in the system, so that’s the first group, which is quite easy to monetize, if you do the system right. Then you have a second, usually much, much larger group of people, who are not strictly against paying. So when we have a publisher who had a paying system before, … the number jump up very quickly in the first few days. If you have a publisher who’s charging for the first time, the number steadily increase, but you need some months, maybe a year, until you get to some really very interesting revenues.”Bella was also asked about the fact that Piano Media bundles newspapers with very different political views and whether this has been a problem for subscribers. Bella said that some people see competing papers in the same bundle and don’t want a penny of their money going to them. Bella then explained that “the way the system works is that your money only goes to the [sites] you are using. When we explain that if you’re not going to the site, then people are not getting money from you, then people are happy.”See the video for Bella’s additional answers to questions about whether this Model could work for other countries, what promises they made to publishers, and why Piano Media has created a partnership Model instead of licensing its technology to publishers (Hint: Unlike most tech companies, Piano Media seems to have figured out that publishers don’t need more technological tools, they need advice on how to harness technology to monetize their content).