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Public Access Media and Community Owned Networks - Community Broadband Bits Podcast #81
After a listener suggested we do a show on the modern role of public access media, we decided to reach out to Mike Wassenaar, now a senior development officer at Free Press and formerly the Executive Director of Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, a great example of the promise of public access.
Mike and I talk about history, present, and future of public access. Historically coupled with the cable companies for both funding and distribution, access centers are now under fire as cable companies have been successful in reducing their funding and distribution.
But we believe there remains a strong demand for local content that is not being met by large corporations and access centers continue to have a strong role to play. That means we need to ensure they are funded and have a means to distribute content, both of which are possible as communities build their own fiber optic networks.
A good place to seek additional information is the Alliance for Community Media. Thanks to Eliz for suggesting this show.
Read the transcript for our discussion here.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show - please e-mail us or leave a comment below. Also, feel free to suggest other guests, topics, or questions you want us to address.
This show is 19 minutes long and can be played below on this page or via iTunes or via the tool of your choice using this feed.
Listen to previous episodes here. You can can download this Mp3 file directly from here.
Find more episodes in our podcast index.
Thanks to Haggard Beat for the music, licensed using Creative Commons.
Cable Access Gets Slammed, Time Porner Gets the Land
This is a guest post, authored by Jay April. Jay is a strong supporter of local authority and community media. He is a documentary filmmaker, video journalist, and new media innovator who now happens to find himself running a community TV and radio station in Maui, Hawaii.
There is a new land grab in Hawaii whereby the government is giving away valuable public land to private business without getting anything in return for the people. Sound familiar? It has happened before in Hawaii – with agriculture, with beaches, with water and now, with the public airwaves. This time the difference is that the land in question is in the form of public electronic real estate, the electromagnetic spectrum. These are the frequencies you pay for to watch cable TV, use the internet or talk on the phone.
Most people don’t know this, but in exchange for using public rights of way - airwaves, telephone poles, electric wires and underground conduits - cable monopolies like Oceanic Time Warner have to pay “rent” in the form of community access channels like Olelo on Oahu, Akaku on Maui, Na Leo on Big Island and Hoike on Kauai. Now, because of new technology, the frequencies or space these channels occupy have suddenly become extremely profitable to cable companies. (Not unlike how lands once granted to indigenous people by treaty became more valuable once minerals were discovered.) That is why Time Warner wants to take over this public property and move these channels to inferior locations while vastly reducing the amount of non-commercial electronic real estate. That is why, if you are an Oceanic Time Warner Cable subscriber, channels are disappearing from your channel line-up altogether, or re-appearing someplace else. So far, instead of holding your land in public trust, the state is falling for the Time Warner plan - hook, line and sinker.
Maybe that is not such a bad thing after all. Oceanic says this techy move will free up more space on the cable for them to bring us all kinds of goodies like High Definition (HD) channels, video on demand channels, enhanced services and the holy grail of faster, better and more affordable internet for all. That’s a good thing, right? We all want to believe. We really do.
Qwest Renews Push to Gut Local Authority over Cable Television
It's 2011 and time for Qwest to renew a push to gut local authority in a number of states - Idaho and Colorado to start. An article for the Denver Post explains the argument:
Phone companies say state-level oversight of video franchising fosters competition because it is less cumbersome for new entrants to secure the right to offer services.
Many states have also eliminated the condition that new video competitors must eventually offer service to every home in a given municipality, a requirement placed on incumbent cable-TV providers.
Gutting local authority is the best way to increase the disparities between those who have broadband and those who do not. Qwest and others are only interested in building out in the most profitable areas -- which then leaves those unserved even more difficult to serve because the costs of serving them cannot be balanced with those who can be served at a lower cost.
The only reason that just about every American living in a city has access to broadband is because franchise requirements forced companies to build out everyone. Without these requirements, cable buildouts would almost certainly have mirrored the early private company efforts to wire towns for electricity -- wealthier areas of town had a number of choices and low-income areas of town had none.
In Idaho, those fighting back against this attempt to limit local authority are worried that statewide franchising will kill their local public access channels - a reality that others face across the nation where these laws have passed.
The channels, which are also used to publicize community events, provide complete coverage of Pocatello City Council, Planning and Zoning and School District 25 board meetings, as well as candidate forums before elections.
Without these local channels, how could people stay informed about what is happening in the community? Local newspapers are increasingly hard to find. In many communities, these channels are the last bastion of local news.
Defending Public Access on the Television Channels
The trend of more people subscribing to broadband as well as cable incumbents (also AT&T with U-Verse) wage war on local public access television stations, some have been questioning whether we even need PEG channels on the television anymore. We do. If anything, the increase in capacity of networks should translate into greater opportunities for local shows to find a local audience.
Rob McCausland, a champion for community media, recently wrote about the the vast majority of communities that cablecast one or more public meetings - a trend that must be expanded.
Of the 254 largest cities cablecasting their government meetings, 197 of them (78%) do so on channels that they themselves manage. Nonprofit organizations manage those channels in 20 of those cities, while the cable companies manage them in 28.These channels provide a crucial public service -- allowing the public to oversee their local government. If anything, we should not be considering decreasing access to this content, we should be finding ways to deliver it on-demand on the television. Ultimately, this programming should be available on all devices -- mobile, computer, television, and should be available as streaming and downloadable podcasts.
Sean McLaughlin Discusses Community Wireless in Eureka, California
On TelecomTV, Sean McLaughlin discusses their local efforts to improve broadband access and the impediments they face from big national carriers.
Sean has a great understanding (and capacity to communicate that understanding) of how media access has changed from a focus on television to a broader focus centered on the Internet.
Burlington Telecom Case Study
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Burlington Telecom, a city department in the largest city of Vermont, offers a world class fiber-to-the-home network offering cable television, fast broadband, and telephone services. This case study explains how they did it.
ILSR issued a report in 2011 that updates this case study: Learning from Burlington Telecom: Some Lessons for Community Networks