westcat

Westwood residents will have a once in 10 years opportunity to express their concerns and needs related to Comcast's cable service next Wednesday, December 9 at 7:30pm as the Board of Selectmen hold an Ascertainment Hearing...

The purpose of the hearing will be to review the performance of one of the cable television operators in Westwood, Comcast during its current license term and to hear testimony on future cable-related needs and interests of the Westwood community.

I'm testifying briefly about WestCAT--Westwood Community Access Television. We've recently hired a project manager to build out our basic broadcasting capabilities and take over management of the signal from Comcast within the next few months. We plan to set up more complete and effective coverage of board meetings and work with community groups to quickly establish a dramatic improvement over the almost-always blue screen and often sometimes inaudible meeting coverage on channel 8. Also, once we have control of the signal, we will be patching in to Verizon, bringing public meeting coverage to all Comcast and Verizon subscribers in Westwood.

One of our big challenges is that although we have safeguarded years of funding paid by Verizon and Comcast to the town--creating a respectable capital reserve that will allow us to purchase the equipment we need--the current fee structure results in an annual operating budget of less than $35,000 per year. Many towns have negotiated agreements with the cable providers to allocate 3-5% of subscriber fees to community access. In Westwood, we get 1%.

I did some quick internet research on "ascertainment hearings" and found some interesting links:

• In Swampscott, an entire website/blog is devoted to an effort to bring community access TV to Swampscott. "Ed"s blog demonstrates some of the great things other communities are doing with community and public access television and documents and includes a 45-minute video of the last ascertainment hearing there in 2004. Here's a clip of one person asking for community access TV.
• Ascertainment hearings are also an opportunity to make the Selectmen aware of your satisfaction with service in general. Here's a very old link to one person's account of the Brookline ascertainment hearing in 2004. Back then, the issue was poor signal quality.

The bottom line is that the purpose of the hearing is for our Selectman to hear from residents what their needs are...this will help them prioritize issues in the ongoing negotiation with Comcast.