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| 3/4/2010 10:38:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | City cable director testifies in Madison
Rice Lake cable director Mick Givens testified last Wednesday, Feb. 24 about a pending state Assembly bill that would reinstate funding for local public access channels. That funding is scheduled to end at the end of this year. Local cable proponents fear public access channels will not be able to operate without the funding.
Givens' testimony, addressing AB 721, was before the state's Committee on Urban and Local Affairs at the Capitol in Madison.
The proposed bill addresses issues local cable providers say were created 2 years ago by a new state law that gave the state, rather than local communities, the right to franchise cable providers.
In Rice Lake, Charter and CTC Telecom have state-issued cable franchises.
That law, the Cable Competition Act, also known as Act 42, called for the end of public access channel funding through franchise fees on Dec. 31, 2010.
Also as a result of the Cable Competition Act, Rice Lake's cable access channel was moved from Channel 14 to Channel 97 and Channel 992. Givens expressed earlier concern that those channels were outside the range of people surfing the channels and that the move reduced transmission quality.
The new state legislation, which is co-sponsored by Rep. Mary Hubler, is called the Cable Consumer Repair Bill. It allows communities to impose a franchise fee to continue funding public access channels, and it requires cable companies to pay for some public access channel equipment. It also addresses the placement of public access channels in the cable channel lineup so that all subscribers have access to those channels.
Hubler said on Monday that there had not yet been a committee vote on the bill, and that it needed to get out of the committee and be referred to the full Assembly before the same process was repeated in the Senate.
Givens, who is also the secretary of the Wisconsin Association of Public Education and Government Channels organization, told the committee that as cable director for the City of Rice Lake, he often receives complaints regarding reception issues with video service providers. He said the Rice Lake channel transmits many home high school basketball games live and that one of the city's two video service providers splits that signal to send out two channels-one in analog format on Channel 97 and one in digital format. Since that split he has been getting many complaints that the digital channel goes black and/or loses audio regularly.
He said the service provider blames it on the city's transmission, but that isn't the problem.
He said for one complaint, he suggested the person contact the service provider because the problems originated with them.
"I had already determined and confirmed the fault was theirs because the reception was good on the competing provider's service," Givens wrote in his presentation notes.
"His letter indicates he went to the local pay station to complain and was immediately told the trouble was all at our studio and that Charter only provided the channel. I went to the Charter pay station in support of the resident and later received an e-mail indicating they had indeed found a defective component in their head-end," he wrote.
Givens said the Rice Lake channel had spent about $2,500 for a device to process and split the signal to distribute to the two providers.
"We had one provider install, at no charge, a $2,500 electronic component to transmit our signal to their head-end. Another provider deducted approximately 10 times that amount for a piece of equipment they called a 'digitizer' to send that same signal to their central office. It is extremely unfair to expect community television to pay that kind of money to provide free programming to the video service providers," Givens wrote.
He said that cable providers were taking cable channels without payment and then taking credit for adding channels to their lineups and lowering the consumer's cost per channel.
"If competition is successful under Act 42 as they would have us believe it will be, how many of these $27,000 charges can a community withstand? That is another reason to continue the 1% PEG fee so communities can build a reserve to afford those charges," he wrote.
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