Posted: 2:21 p.m. Friday, March 18, 2016

Middletown to stream council meetings on Internet

By Mike Rutledge

Staff Writer

MIDDLETOWN — 

Middletown plans to fully abandon community-access TV Middletown (Channel 24),  http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/middletown-considers-future-of-channel-24-after-tv/npt52/" rel="nofollow - City officials, who will save most of the $112,000 that was budgeted for TV Middletown this year, hope live streaming of meetings over the Internet — and posting them the next morning on YouTube — actually will give more residents access to meeting footage. Losing access will be mostly older residents who have cable, but don’t use the Internet.

City Manager Doug Adkins recommended to council this week that the city seek bids to buy video-recording equipment for council chambers, the usual meeting site of both the council and school board meetings.

Time Warner Cable recommended “that we abandon 24 completely,” Adkins said. “They said their online streaming customers now significantly outweigh their cable customers in Middletown, and that by going to a streaming option or a YouTube-type option for council meetings, anybody that had Internet access would be able to continue to watch city of Middletown meetings from this chamber, as opposed to the Time Warner customers who only have cable, which is less than half the households.”

There will be some costs associated with the change: The city needs to buy recording equipment for council chambers, and the city’s in-house communications intern will spend time recording the meetings.

Nobody complained when TV Middletown stopped sending Channel 24 signals on Jan. 10, Pamela McDonald, Time Warner’s vice president of government relations, wrote in a March 7 letter to the city.

McDonald in her letter also noted that under state law, community-access channels are not considered to be “substantially utilized” — and can be reclaimed by the cable provider — if fewer than 40 hours of programming appear on the channel weekly and less than 60 percent is locally produced. The company told Adkins it doesn’t count if the city merely shows meetings over and over.

“In their opinion, it would take at least a full-time and a part-time employee to operate Channel 24, because they would be expecting us to generate the programming throughout the times,” Adkins said. “Now you’re actually talking about running a TV station in-house, and I’m not sure we want to get into that.”

Adkins said Time Warner had no way of knowing how many people viewed the meetings on Channel 24. But with YouTube, it will be possible to track viewership.

“We’re going to talk to the school district,” Adkins said. “If they want some extra bells and whistles, they can kick in some money for their bells and whistles. But we’ll make sure we have whatever council wants for our needs.”