Printed From Acorn-Online.com
Future of town government TV heads to Hartford for debate
Apr 2, 2008
Thousands of area residents who watch their town government in action on local cable stations may be in for a shock, according to a release from the Area 9 Cable Council.
While Cablevision continues to air such stations on channel 79, new competitors to the TV market may make such valuable programming harder to find, the group said. Area Nine Cable Council members recently submitted testimony at the state Capitol, as the legislature’s technology committee heard comments on the future of community access television-the public, educational, and governmental, or PEG, access stations that Wilton residents view on channels 77, 78, and 79.
Cable TV advisory boards, state officials, and public broadcasters argued that, like cable companies, AT&T should not charge local communities for carrying their local access stations on its new U-Verse video service and that local access channels deserve equivalent status to other channels on U-Verse’s line-up.
Last year the state legislature adopted a new law that allows AT&T and others to offer television services to state residents under a certificate system that contains fewer regulations than the current cable franchise system, the group said. The Area Nine Cable Council supports competition, but supports a regulatory level playing field for consumers to receive the benefits of true competition, according to the release.
Hal Levy of Westport, chairman of the cable council, said as an advocate for community access television, the council opposes not only charging municipalities and customers for interconnection costs, but also the way in which AT&T proposes to carry local community access channels and the Connecticut Network in its newly launched U-Verse system. Unlike cable TV, the U-Verse system employs a separate, drop-down menu, Web-based system in its channel line-up for broadcasting PEG channels, the group said.
“There’s no reason to make public affairs and town government TV a ‘second class citizen’ on the AT&T system,” said Mr. Levy.
Carole Young-Kleinfeld, who testified at the Capitol as one of Wilton’s representatives to the cable council, said that U-Verse demonstrations from other states show that AT&T’s system for viewing community access channels can take almost a minute to load these channels, offers poorer resolution and a smaller screen than regular channels, is not closed-captionable, and is not recordable.
“The purpose of public, educational, and governmental access is to provide citizens, schools and local government access to the airways, offer a way for citizens to view their government in action, and build a sense of community,” she said. “We want to make viewing community access channels as easy as possible — not make it frustrating to locate and watch these programs.”
In its testimony, the cable council supported the continuation of town-specific — rather than regional or shared — community access channels and requested that local educational access programs not be broadcast throughout the state on AT&T’s U-Verse system in order to protect the identities of young students who appear in the local programs.
The Area Nine Cable Council is one of 24 state mandated advisory councils that serve as advocates for public, educational, and governmental access television and for improved customer service from cable television companies in the state. Each chief elected official in Fairfield County appoints at least two governmental representatives and one educational representative to the council.
© Copyright 2008 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers