How can we start a PEG (Community Access) cable TV channel?

Cafe Society
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In my small rural community, the local Cable TV company (Charter) has given us a PEG (Public/Educational/Government) channel for community use. Since it became available last December, it has been empty, yet franchise fees are being collected and remitted to the Town government.

The Town government’s franchise aggreement with Charter says these fees are

So far, so good. Several of us citizens would like to start such a TV channel, but we are faced with the possibility of the Town Board rewriting the Franchise Agreement to allow the fees to be used for general fund, or roads, or whatever. (The Town’s attorney has said this is both possible and legal, the Town Chairman may have his eye on this fund for other purposes, and no one on the Town Board gets cable TV. So you can see this will not be a slam-dunk.)

I hope that some of us who support the PEG channel idea can put together a proposal to the Town Board, describing the purpose of our venture and a budget for equipment. We do not want to ask for funds beyond the franchise fees collected, on the theory that non-subscribers shouldn’t be forced to pay tax money to support cable subscribers. So our budget amounts must be bare-bones, and everyone operating the channel will be a volunteer.

For the first year or so, we hope to avoid the expense of buying video cameras and editing equipment, and get most of our video content from a nearby, larger town which has 3 PEG channels in operation already. We have already reached an agreement with that town to let us use any of their content in the form of VHS tapes, copied at our expense. These will be primarily government meetings.

What we need most of all is advice on how to proceed, such as:[ul][li]Are there any associations of Community Access TV that might help us organize and plan? Google hasn’t turned up much, or perhaps I am not using the right search terms.[/li][li]Our control room will basically be a stack of cheap VCRs and a computer controller/scheduler. Does anyone know of software/hardware that will handle this task?[/li][li]To keep costs down and provide valuable experience, we plan to use the local high school students for day-to-day tasks, such as feeding tapes, scheduling, making PSAs (Public Service Announcements), etc. Our School Superintendent is 100% behind the idea, but a cable representative has cautioned that other communities have not had much success with using students. Anybody out there with experience to share?[/li][li]Besides the VCRs and a scheduler, what other hardware/software do we absolutely need? I’m thinking relatively big-ticket items, not just a pile of cables and adapters from Radio Shack or my junk box.[/li][li]We expect to create PSAs in MS Power Point, and whenever a tape is not playing, the switcher will revert to a cheap computer running a PP slide show converted to NTSC, paging continuously thru all active slides. But is there a better way to do this?[/ul][/li]Anyone’s experience, technical or political, in this kind of venture will be much appreciated, and I thank you very much.

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I have absolutely nothing constructive to offer you, I just wanted to say that I think what you’re doing is absolutely great, and I hope it works out for you and I wish you the best of luck with it all. That’s just so cool.

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Check out The Alliance for Community Media.

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yojimboguy: The Alliance site hasn’t proved that useful to answer my questions. But is did lead me to a better one: GATV Institute, which has an online Guideblook manual, pretty good. According to that, we are at least on the right track.

Still, there is no substitute hands-on experience. I sure would like to hear from those who have been thru this process already or are actively involved in similar projects.

And in particular, we will need an “event controller” to switch from VCR to VCR unattended acording to a clock. The only device I have found so far will control up to 8 devices (VCRs, DVD, whatever), made by Leightronix. It is pricey ($1000, so you see how small our budget is – the next model up is $3000). I have used this model and it is sadly deficient in the software department (you can’t use standard Windows conventions like “save as” or cut’n’paste for scheduling, for example). I was hoping there is a better unit out there somewhere.

And in case you’re wondering why we need to control 8 devices at once – for unattended operation, we will have a tape in each of several VCRS. The event controller will play and rewind, but it won’t eject & insert, so our max number of daily programs will be equal to the max number of VCRS. Simple, but effective.

And, White Lightning, thanks for your support – that in itself is constructive!