Facing Each Other

Posted on by connecticutacm

It’s not easy for access media people to get together in Connecticut, although the distances are not great.  Dedication to the mission and finding the resources to carry it out absorb our time.  Nevertheless  we’ve managed to hold two face-t0-face meetings within the four months.

In September, Citizens TV in New Haven hosted a group of seven out-of-towners for lunch and a tour of their facility (recently converted from a veterinary hospital).  Over lunch we discussed the loss of the PEGPETIA fund to state budget deficits and what to do about access funding in general. Various ideas were brought up and put down before we settled on some that might be worth pursuing:

  1. Increase the per subscriber PEG support as defined in CGS section 16-331a, subsection (k).
  2. Preserve the PEGPETIA fund (CGA section 16-331cc) by either preventing further sweeps, sweeping only in alternate years, or sweeping only a percentage of the money going into the account.
  3. Provide PEG programming on the electronic program guide (EPG), and provide all PEGs a path to high-definition (HD) channels.

(Details will go into another post sometime soon.) We had hoped a meeting with a key state senator could be arranged.  But before that could happen, more and worse budget news was announced. Clearly it will be even harder to get legislators’ attention this year.

Nevertheless, in January seventeen folks made it to the Meet&Greet at Newington Community TV.  We discussed legislative ideas (again), Frontier TV, and Shop–especially technology and its tricks. What was different from last time?

  1. New suggestion to propose legislation so that the state per subscriber fee never goes lower than the previous year (as miscalculated and later corrected for 2015).
  2. Remind PURA that they may use “any other consideration” besides CPI to set per subscriber fees for the year.
  3. Steven Simonin’s ideas to improve service for cable consumers.  He was reported to be working on this at the federal level with Sen. Blumenthal.
  4. Frontier (new owner of the “competitive video” service formerly known as U-Verse) was supposed to talk to PEG entities about issues by end of January 2015. Frontier has visited Nutmeg twice.  Get in touch with us if you want contact information for Frontier Communications representatives.

Shop talk

  1. There’s still interest in file-sharing among CT PEGs, although there’s no news on that project. Nationwide file-sharing is available on TelVue Connect [and the Internet Archive].  Wallingford Public Access Association uses Spanish-language programming from file-sharing service.
  2. Who uses which brand of of broadcast server
  3. Streaming methods used by different people.
  4. On Demand – Vimeo vs YouTube, revenue from sponsorships or from YouTube advertising.
  5. Political season and how different organizations handle candidate statements, demands for equal time, campaigns that take clips from access-produced programs for political purposes

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