In today's competitive media landscape, the future of public service media (PSM) depends on maintaining its legitimacy among the public. While previous research has predominantly approached legitimacy-as-process (Fehlmann, 2023), with focus on the normative perspective of PSM's public value, this study adopts a legitimacy-as-perception approach to explore the expectations of the public. Consequently, it examines the extent to which citizens' and normative perspectives align. Through data from 10 focus group discussions (with 60 participants) conducted in the Czech Republic, we identified four primary dimensions for public expectations for PSM: (1) the expected roles and functions of PSM; (2) the general characteristics of PSM content (to define the desired nature of PSM content); (3) the principles governing the functioning of PSM (to outline how PSM should operate); and (4) specific requirements for PSM news and non-news content. The study shows that, compared to existing normative conceptualisations of PSM’s public value, the public focuses mostly on individual value and, to a limited extent, on societal value, while entirely neglecting industry value. Additionally, rather than referring to abstract concepts, citizens' expectations revolve around more concrete functions and tasks, with a common denominator: both distinctiveness from commercial media and distinctiveness from multinational VOD platforms that offer globalized content.