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Date: 5/14/2015
EAST LONGMEADOW – A third channel is slated to be up and programmed on East Longmeadow Community Television (ELCAT) this September.
The new channel would focus on delivering educational content to the community.
ELCAT Director Don Maki told Reminder Publications middle school students would create and cover events for most of the content for the new channel.
“[Birchland Park] Middle School has a tremendous production facility and TV studio and that’s utilized everyday as part of the school curriculum at the middle school,” he added.
Maki said the partnership between ELCAT, middle school students, and Birchland Park TV studio teacher Michael Naglieri during the past several years has been beneficial.
“We produced all of the school concerts that take place at the high school during the school year,” Maki said. “Those are largely done by Mike Naglieri and middle school students.”
The ELCAT Committee has proposed to “better utilize the Birchland studio and getting those kids into producing content for the town,” Maki said.
Middle school students would create educational video content such as covering history day and Future City competitions, drama productions, parent teacher organization sponsored events, as well as some sports, he noted.
“One thing we started doing last year [producing videos for] the [Recreation Department’s] basketball tournament [and] the in-town basketball,” he added. “That’s been really popular. A lot of the early part of the tournament takes part at Birchland.”
Birchland Park’s TV studio has a large amount of space, is fully equipped with studio cameras and a sound booth, Maki said. The studio was constructed along with the middle school in 2000.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for the middle school kids to get into producing content for the bigger world,” he added. “They have the facilities and they have instruction over there. They have a great program and a lot of talented kids.”
East Longmeadow High School students produce sports content, cover town government meetings, and create news videos, Maki added. There are about 25 to 30 ELHS students enrolled in video classes for ELCAT and 20 to 25 students who volunteer.
ELCAT operated one channel that provided public content prior to 2010, Maki said. That same year, ELCAT began running a channel with government related content.
“The overriding idea has always been that we try to program as much town-produced content as possible on our channels,” he added. “What we put on the channels is produced by or about the people of East Longmeadow.”
In 2014, ELCAT produced 454 video programs for the community, he noted. Forty-four to 45 sports games were covered last fall.
Maki said the town is in the process of negotiating the renewal of its cable license with Charter and will send out surveys to gauge what kind of content residents are looking for and to gather data for the negotiations.
The town could negotiate for support for public, government, and educational public access content, customer service, and infrastructure, he noted.
“It gives us a little bit of leverage with the cable company,” he explained. “The customer service has been the ongoing issue with Charter.”
If the survey responses indicate a large percentage of customer service dissatisfaction, the town could try to negotiate with Charter to open a customer service office in East Longmeadow, Maki said.
He added that the nearest Charter customer service offices are located in Chicopee and Ludlow.
A proposed transaction in which Comcast would have acquired Time Warner Cable Inc was terminated on April 24. As part of the agreement, Comcast and Charter would have exchanged 1.6 million Charter subscribers for 1.5 million Time Warner customers.
“As people will know by now, Charter is not going away,” he added. “We are not getting Comcast.”
Maki said ELCAT will mail surveys to every household and it will also be available on the town’s website.
“It’s important that people fill it out even if they don’t have cable,” he added. “We want to hear from people who don’t have cable because we provide content on the Internet, on the YouTube page.”
ELCAT’s channels also recently changed unexpectedly six months ago, Maki said.
ELCAT was given three weeks notice of the change at that time.
The public content channel is 191, the town government related channel is 192, and the upcoming education channel will be 194.