This paper presents the application of membrane algorithms to broadcasting problems, which are regarded as NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. A membrane algorithm, called HPSOPS, is proposed by appropriately combining membrane systems and a hybrid particle swarm optimization with wavelet mutation (HPSOWM). HPSOPS is designed with the hierarchical membrane structure and transformation/communication-like rules of membrane systems, the representation of individuals and the evolutionary mechanism of HPSOWM. Experimental results from various broadcasting problems show that HPSOPS performs better than its counterpart HPSOWM and genetic algorithms reported in the literature, in terms of search capability, efficiency, solution stability and precision.