COMMUNITY ACCESS TELEVISION (IN CANADA)

I popped open Toronto's finest newspaper today and came across this article... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080410.wcommunitytv/BNStory/Entertainment/home

My posting today will consist, essentially, of a reply I made to a passionate e-mail a friend of mine sent me:

The article is very interesting, indeed. I think cable should be kept around for the simple reason it promotes some accountability on the part of the big all consuming cable operators. The whole industry is hardly grassroots anymore, as the article points out: It is an eating machine and having to produce, in-house, television operations, only affects their bottom line. To use business parlance, "it cuts into potential profits".

I too obtained valuable experience in community cable tv operations. Cable 8 in Small City, Ontario, Canada (later to become Cable 10 to align it with other services across the province) had a small studio on Main Street, complete with two Sony B&W cameras, a new Colour camera (these were all "Vidicon" tube cameras, of course), and a newly arrived Sony '2850' editing console (which excited us in its technological-ness and the fact that it cut accurately within two frames). This was 1977; the year my training began.

Times have changed, to be sure. But there is every reason to have that lab situation where young people, or any people, can access a television operation they probably pay for every month in one of those bone-crunching cable television bills.

I am not a member of cable television -- I really only watch TVO and the CBC on a regular basis -- but this only makes me more passionate about "Community Access Television".

Historically, the CRTC makes bone-headed rulings. They must decide one day to use a modicum of good or common sense.

... Don't get me going about 'Toronto 1 Television' and the Case of the Licence Peddler! (If anything or anyone should be shut down it should be the bulk of the CRTC's staff.)