Staff was queried on satisfaction levels with the technical capabilities of the cable plant. When asked if satisfied, staff stated “no.”
The reason for this dissatisfaction is that while there are remote drops at various locations throughout the city, WCCA has not been informed where those drops are. WCCA is aware of drops at the DCU Center and St. Paul’s Cathedral, but these are the only two drops it is aware of. Additionally there seems to have been past confusion regarding the protocol for accessing these drops.
In the past, WCCA TV was able to do live programming from a drop on Shrewsbury Street (Columbus Day Parade) and the Performing Arts School. However, when WCCA tried to cover the gubernatorial rally at the DCU, it was denied access and told it needed to give two weeks notice of using the drops and receive approval from Charter management.21 A concern was raised that using the drop without having a Charter technician present could possibly “crash” the City’s I-Net. While giving a two week notice is not terribly burdensome, and the City has a compelling concern for how the drops are accessed, it was the first time WCCA had been informed of this policy, so it was not able to cover the gubernatorial rally live. We have previously addressed the need for a dedicated strand for video delivery on the INet in the “Channels” section of this report.
Staff did report that there are problems with the transmission of the channel and when there are problems they are fixed quickly. However, staff also noted there are transmission issues that have existed since 1997. For example, when there is “snow” Charter fixes the problem fairly quickly but there is intermittent interference from the adjacent Channel 12 when 13 switches to live cablecasting. Channel 13 experiences “ghosting” and “graininess” at these times, resulting in an estimated twenty to thirty percent degradation of the signal (more noticeable on LCD monitors).
WCCA has experienced the channel going dark unexpectedly but staff reports that is usually the result of an outage on the overall system not just Channel 13.
Staff does not believe that Charter is responsive to their technical needs because of Charter’s denial of a second channel and the lack of inclusion of WCCA TV programming in the preview guide.
o Provide WCCA TV a list of remote drops in the city. This will assist WCCA and the community by allowing WCCA to partner with the institutions that have these remote drops to provide live coverage of institutional and community events.
o Include in the franchise agreement and/or contract a protocol for WCCA (or the government or educational channels) to access these remote locations. Provide guidelines that will streamline the process and not prove to be over burdensome for either WCCA, Charter or the City.
o Provide language in the franchise agreement that would require access channels be transmitted with the same quality as cable and broadcast channels. Resolve the interference problems between Channels 12 and 13.
o As previously stated in the Channel Recommendations section of this report, require Charter to provide the second channel to WCCA TV as per the current franchise agreement.
o Require Charter to include WCCA TV programming in their preview channel, establish guidelines for how that information is transmitted to Charter and Charter’s obligations to provide that information to the public.