Public Access TV dead?

Yes, it looks pretty grim.
Link: Congress Poised to Kill Community TV

Public Access TV is not the favorite channel for Americans.
But in many communities, it is the only TV channel that actually shows people like them talking...and expresses their opinions and ideas. 
As many of you know, I worked at a public access TV in Manhattan until recently.
I brought many of the philosophies I learned at this community TV station to videoblogging.
"Get everyone involved in the conversation".

These community TV stations are funded by local franchise agreements with the Cable Companies who are given a private monopoly to run the cable system in a given city.
All they must do is give back some channel space and a small amount of funding to allow the people to put on their own programming. Its literally pennies compared to their multi-million dollar yearly profits. The Cable and telephone companies now want out of this set-up now that they have secured monopolies across the country.
What could be a bigger hassle than to deal with thousands of local communities across the country who want access to put out their own media?
 
In my mind, this makes Videoblogging even more important.....and each
of our efforts to spread the knowledge of how to get involved.
Strange days.

Gena says:

My concern is now with the potential walling off of the Internet by
the phone companies. Step one - they lock us out of public access.
Step two - the phone companies put the squeeze on Congress & FCC or whoever to charge for faster/heavy bandwidth usage. Segregation for the elite, reduced access (and videoblogging) for the rest of us.

Now this will bite them in the tukas in the long run cuz this is just
going to inspire some latent genius to invent something to bypass
phone company distribution and away we go into the new frontier.

Comments

[jonny goldstein]

I'm on MNN tonight. Guess I should enjoy it while I can!