Leased Access Programers

2011-11-07T16:00:00.002-05:00

Well, I've finally got something to blog about.

Mississippi Republican Congressman Greg Harper spoke to a press corp luncheon today in Jackson, Ms. and mentioned how hard it is to cut spending (meaning federal spending, of course). He cited a couple of different areas where expenses have grown rather than decreased.

At the question period I asked if "faced with the reality that many small business owners are experiencing less income due to the overall economy, would you (he) actively support --push for--a roll back in Congressional pay--thereby having members of Congress genuinely feel our pain?"

His answer was no and briefly spoke about his staff not being cut. When I pursued the issue, asking once again, would he take a pay cut he replied "NO!" and then commented he took a pay cut to be in Congress.

If he indeed makes less in Congress than he did in law practice, then it was his choice. The declining incomes of many small business owners is not by their choice.

I was hoping he was want to set the example for government curtailing expenses and lead the charge for all members of Congress to pass legislation to reduce their pay, that is their personal salary, 'perks', staffs as well as the overall congressional staffing.

We started

2011-03-07T08:07:00.003-05:00

StogTv will produce a weekly 'self-hosted' TV-Talk show for Hudson Holliday, GOP primary candidate for Mississippi governor.

I've been trying for years to get candidates to see the potential of this and finally shared the idea with one enterprising enough to say, "let's do it". It shouldn't be surprising. Holliday is a retired National Guard two-star General,"citizen-soldier", who joined in college as an enlisted soldier. He graduated from USM with a business degree and since then has successfully owned and operated a variety of businesses including a crop dusting service where he sometimes was the pilot; real estate and property development; concrete and sheet metal; part owner of a wetlands mitigation bank and for the past four years and elected local county official.

It's easy to see how someone this entrepreneurial is willing to now pioneer in TV with leased access.

StogTv has already been approached by one other statewide candidate and expects once the show is airing to see interest from local candidates in the six local areas the show will air; Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Meridian and Tupelo, Ms. as well as Memphis, Tn.

Political candidate prospects

2010-06-29T13:01:00.002-04:00

Many don't realize the rules that apply to cable LO (local origination) channels, cable networks and broadcasters do not apply to using 'leased access'.

Why not offer candidates low cost airtime as part of your leased access programming and help them post the videos on Google as well.

Check out http://mashable.com/2010/06/03/google-campaign-toolkits/

Leased Access programmers should 'rule the roost' in political programming.

Why no help from members of Congress?

2010-06-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

I've been unable to get my U.S. Senator, a member of the Senate Commerce committee, with FCC oversight to simply make inquiry as to whether or not FCC is ever going to defend the new rules adopted in Nov. '07 that have been held up by a U.S. District court 'stay' at the request of NCTA, the powerful national association of the cable industry.

Then by accident I came across a website that shows NCTA's political action committee donated $5,000 to his campaign. To find out how beholden your member of Congress is to the cable industry visit (this site won’t allow a tag so fill in the spaces) campaignmoney / political / committees / national - cable – and - telecommunications - association – political – action – committee – committee – ncta – pac. Asp ? cycle = 08 (again, hopefully you can figure the URL by removing spaces and put in w w w )

If you're a LAPer (leased access programmer) or would like to be one or you simply think big government and big business run roughshod over what the chairman of BP calls 'the small people' then you may need to get involved in cleaning house before it's too late.

It’s no secret cable doesn’t like competition, yet it appears that is exactly what Congress wants. Section 612 of the 1992 Act, which deals with leasded access reads: “The purpose of this section is to promote competition in the delivery of diverse sources of video programming and assure the widest possible diversity of information sources are made available to the public from cable systems in a manner consistent with growth and development of cable systems.” Section 612 also encourages production and distribution of competing commercial programming that is not affiliated with the cable systems. In other words, while Congress is clearly interested in fostering diversity of information and programming, it wants to do it in a for-profit environment.

However, apparently that was a different Congress. My U.S. Senator only went to DC in 1993 as a member of the House. He was appointed to the Senate Dec. 31, 2007. NCTA bestowed $5,000 on him in 2008.

So much for representation of ‘the small people’.

waking up

2010-06-25T08:26:00.002-04:00

New post on why LAPers may not be getting any help from their members of Congress coming soon. My two U.S. Senators each got $5,000 from the powerful cable industry, NCTA, in '08.
Our troubles with being ignored by FCC became worse beginning in '08.

Switched Video

2008-08-03T10:36:00.000-04:00

Cable systems should be regulated based on two categories:

A. those who employ switched video and
B. those who don't.

Since most cable systems have exiled leased access to TV "Gorky" i.e. the digital tier, when they employ Switched Video, our presence on their digital line up uses no more bandwidth and capacity regardless of weather the customer is watching us or something else since switched video only sends one digital program stream at a time to each set top box (not counting previews).

We should get a break on the price since our presence in their digital switched video line up is not effecting their capacity at the expense of another channel or service. On analog we did use bandwidth even if no one was watching. Not so with switched video.

Live Remote Broadcast - Election Returns

2008-08-01T15:26:00.000-04:00

In an email Charlie Stogner asked me to share my experiences putting together the live election returns for our lease access channels.

I had purchased an "old" tv studio about two years ago...most of the inventory ended up in the garbage. A keeper of the equipment was an Videonics MX1 and an audio mixing board.

First, I got with the local phone company, they were very receptive to the idea of placing an internet connection in the county courthouse. We ended up with a two T1 lines paired, which gave me 1.5mb up and 1.5mb down...dedicated. We needed all this so we could communicate with our "broadcast" equipment at the two cable headends. We did not use full screen video, we used 320X240 and centered it to the bottom of the screen and placed an advertising banner above the video screen for the phone company. (The phone company traded the ad space for the two T1 lines) We also sold the ad space on the right side of the screen and kept the left side of the screen for self promotion.

WE use Scala InfoChannel5 as our playback units at the headends. Scala picked up our internet feed without any real problems.

We also streamed the election return on our website. We used a hosting company for the streaming and they seemed to work very well. Although we did get one disconnect to the cable headeands. I'm not sure if it was the Scala Players or the hosting company. I'm leaning toward the players.

Anyway, we showed up at the court house about 4 hours ahead of broadcast for set up. We had the following equipment:

Videonics Video Mixer
Audio Mixing Board
2-laptop computers....one was for palyback of sponsorship commercials and the other was to monitor the scala players at the headends (this was very important).
3 cameras
Mics
router
Desktop computer for sending the Windows Media Encoder feed to the hosting company.

All in all it went pretty smooth. Our small community has never had anything like this done live before. We received loads of complements and 25 paying sponsors. We made the splash I wanted to make with this Live Election Returns on TV Camden.

FCC Issues

2008-07-29T12:05:00.000-04:00

An open letter to Leased Access Programmers and Regulators:

How Cable TV Leased Access Programers are Denied Live Carriage

Federal Law says that Leased Access Programers must be treated the same as 'non'-leased access programers regarding technical issues. Based on past FCC rulings, some cable operators feel that has given them technological veto power when Leased Access Programers seek to employ innovative ways to deliver live programing which have not been used in the past by others on their systems.

Most cable companies use expensive fiber optic cable or satellite or microwave links to deliver their live 'non-leased access programs' including their own in-house local-origination programing to their headends for distribution. It is often news or current events oriented. Many cable operators require leased access programers to use the same old, expensive methods for live delivery as they do or provide the programs to them on tape. But improvements in technology now offer more efficient and affordable live program delivery methods by use of the Internet *. However, many cable operators are attempting to prohibit Internet-delivered programming altogether, a clear violation of Net Neutrality, even though it delivers broadcast-legal signals to their insertion points. They claim that if they don't receive other programing over the Internet, they can prohibit us from using it too. By doing this, the cable operators place a false barrier-to-entry into the marketplace.

We all know that mere carriage on a cable system is no guarantee of success. High viewership and ad revenues are. Live programing can deliver larger audiences and higher revenues. But you can't succeed in any market if you can't get in to the market. Far too many Leased Access Programmers are relegated to compete in the marketplace of 'day-old goods' rather than 'fresh goods'. Tape, rather then live feeds. Cable Operators deliberately and without technical justification too often restrict our program delivery methods and thereby guarantee that our products will be 'stale' when viewed.

Allowing cable companies to stop their competitors (we are also their customers) from employing new and innovative program delivery methods is a major conflict of interest that clearly demands swift, aggressive and independent enforcement with penalties for violators. Currently, complaints to the FCC can take years to resolve, lagging woefully behind the pace of technology, also resulting in few penalties for the violators. Justice delayed is justice denied. If the FCC staff would simply enforce the current laws in a timely manner, most new laws and lawsuits would be unnecessary. Until then, Leased Access Programers should seriously consider petitioning the courts for a Writ of Mandamus or lobby for new Congressional remedies.

What industry, other than cable, in this country, gets to dictate to it's competitors what technology they can employ in their private businesses?

The status quo is inhibiting innovation and efficiencies and is grossly anti-small business and anti-localism by depriving local viewers of independent, diverse points of view on issues affecting their economic, spiritual, social and political lives. The fastest way for the FCC to bring about more localism is to enforce the rights of Leased Access Programers to use any method of delivering broadcast quality signals to the insertion points that they choose.

Furthermore, this issue is very much about de facto Internet censorship of an entire class of information (i.e. cable news) including freedom of the press. Remember we are the press too.

The bottom line is this. .. this is all about fear, power and money. The cable giants don't want to see happen to their cash-cow News Channels what has happened to the daily newspapers in this country at the hands of the Internet Bloggers. In there own words, they want to hold back the 'flood gates' of leased access. They like the concentration of power in their hands as much as their bully pulpits (not to mention their profits), with seemingly little concern for what Congress intended or any resulting harm to fair competition or the public.

For the most part, Congress seems to be afraid to take them on because of the heavy hammer they wield via their news operations and they clearly have more power now than in 1996. Kudo's to the FCC for at least making an attempt to enforce the will of congress. Please don't stop now.

Jerry Kenney
Kenney Broadcasting Corporation
2640 Spruce Creek Blvd. E.
Port Orange, FL 32128
386-788-6386
386-212-1369 (mobile)

* http://www.streambox.com

Checking in

2008-07-29T06:46:00.001-04:00

I was on the road and missed getting to comment on this great idea of a blog devoted to leased access issues created by Gerry Kenny of Daytona, Fl.
Gerry years ago filed petitions that helped set precedents still helpful today. Thank goodness today he's still willing to push to insure FCC does the job Congress gave them to insure the law is followed by cable sites.
Presently my firm, StogMedia, has a petition pending at FCC that will affect all cable sites and the way LAPers (leased access programmers) are permitted to take advanatge of IPTV technology. Needless to say, 'net neutrality' as well as egress is involved.
At issue with petitions is why the staff of the Media Bureau at FCC now and has in the past sat on releasing decisions where they can give no rationale, sensible, reasonable, explanation of why they do so. This too often results in LAPers suffering hardships for long periods of them when eventually FCC actually rules for the cable site to cease an unjust action.
Sometimes, even when the staff rules in favor of the petitioner (LAPer) they wait so long the ruling is moot with the LAPer having had to give up and stop operations by that time.

So, here's my suggestion for any readers of this Blog. Please add any and all problems you've had with any cable operator. Be specific, name the operator, the issue and what you had to do to get it corrected--if you were ever able to do so.

Charlie Stogner, president Leased Acess Programmers Assn.

Live Feeds to Headends Via the Internet?

2008-07-27T21:22:00.000-04:00

Are any of you feeding live programing to headends over the Internet?
Please let us know which operator (we don't need to know the city) and what methods you are using.