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Home My WebLink AboutMN-CABLE-2018-06-05City of Ithaca Cable Access Oversight Committee Meeting Minutes Tuesday, June 5, 2018 at 5 PM (as approved August 7, 2018) Meeting Room, PEGASYS Community Media Center 519 West Green Street, Ithaca, NY Present: Chair Rich DePaolo, vice-chair Wies van Leuken, secretary W ayles Browne, Common Council liaison Ducson Nguyen, member Sue Perlgut; Access Studio Coordinator Lauren Stefanelli. 01. Call to Order 5:10 by DePaolo. 02. Agenda Additions and/or Deletions: none. 03. Public Comments: none. 04. Approval of Minutes of the May 1, 2018 Meeting: approved 5-0 without change. 05. Access Studio Coordinator Report: attached. See also Item 7 below. Stefanelli reports that the reorganization of the cablecast schedule is working out well. She now copies evening blocks of shows and pastes them into afternoon and morning schedules. It increases the number of scheduled plays from 4 to 6, provides more predictability for viewers of when programming will appear and still leaves room for 1-time shows and TBS’s. Stefanelli proposed that producers who post their programs on YouTube note that they premiered on the PEGASYS PEG channel. She can provide producers with the PEGASYS logo. 06. Member Reports a. Visioning Session – Discussion with Ithaca-based free-lance journalist Josh Brokaw. Mr. Brokaw did not attend the meeting, but provided an Email with his visions. This will be further discussed at a future meeting. Van Leuken will mail the next Agenda to Brokaw. b. 2019 Budget Schedule. DePaolo: Municipalities should pass the budget resolution by the end of June. Nguyen: it is on the Ithaca City Council’s June 6 agenda. DePaolo will submit it to the Town of Ithaca, and van Leuken to the Village of Cayuga Heights. c. Quarterly Franchise Fee Report from City, Town and Village. Van Leuken: the municipalities should have received the report for the first quarter (Q1) of 2018 by now. They should ask Spectrum the number of customers–preferably every month, but at least for one month every quarter. d. Storage of PEG shows on Spectrum’s PEG Server. Stefanelli, referring to item 05b of the May 1, 2018 minutes: yes, each producer can have a folder on Spectrum’s PEG server that has the capacity to hold up to 6 shows. e. Publicity & Outreach Committee. The P&O Committee most recently hosted the “Jeoparody” show. It can be watched on the PEG home page. Its next meeting will be scheduled at the end of the summer. 07. PEGASYS issues – discussion of May 2018 Coordinator Report’s Action Steps a. Archiving public access shows: Stefanelli is researching possibilities to archive PEG TV shows. See attached Coordinator’s report. She is in touch with the Public Library and the History Center. Media conversion is required for shows produced on videotape. She listed producers who in the past have done thousands of interviews using VHS tapes on local topics, some of which have historic value. She is pursuing funding for a media conversion project. CAP (Community Arts Partnership) grants might be available. Perlgut: Legacy Foundation of Tompkins County (http://tclegacy.org/) is another possible source of grants. Perlgut suggests giving a workshop on how to use Facebook as another way to archive shows. b. Training/Providing Equipment for Podcasts. Stefanelli attended a workshop on making podcasts at the Library. They are relatively easy to make. Nguyen makes one covering governmental issues. He edits it with Audacity, pays a small fee for hosting it, and advertises it on Facebook. Stefanelli and Nguyen discussed how to p ut his podcasts on Channel 15. Perlgut: let’s give a workshop at PEGASYS on making podcasts. Stefanelli: it would have to be run by someone else than me –someone who’s doing a podcast now. DePaolo: I can bring microphones for a demonstration. You need a room with sound isolation, rather than an ordinary room. Audacity provides free software. Stefanelli: the editing suite has Adobe Audition software on it. If somebody makes a local podcast, we can telecast it with a video slate. c. Holding Regular Events: The studio could be used to screen movies. The P&O Committee will discuss that at their next meeting. 08. Old Business a. Franchise Agreement. DePaolo: no new draft from Charter has been received. 09. New Business: none. 10. Next meeting: August 7 (skipping July). 11. Adjournment: 6:17. ================ Contact information for AOC members: City of Ithaca: Wayles Browne, secretary <ewb2@cornell.edu>. City of Ithaca: Ducson Nguyen, continuing Common Council liaison <dnguyen@cityofithaca.org>. City of Ithaca: member Sue Perlgut <sperlgut@gmail.com>. Town of Ithaca: Rich DePaolo, chair <rd@richdepaolo.com>, <RDePaolo@town.ithaca.ny.us>. Village of Cayuga Heights: Wies van Leuken, vice chair <pmv4@cornell.edu>. Web site for the PEGASYS studio, with program schedules: http://pegasys.webstarts.com/index.html studio location: 612 West Green Street, Ithaca, New York mailing address: 519 West State Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 phone (607) 272-7272 fax (607) 277-5404 PEGASYS staff: studio manager Lauren Stefanelli <Lauren.Stefanelli@charter.com> June 2018 Access Studio Coordinator Report  Media Center Projects Access Program Digital Archive: I spoke to the coordinator of the Local Voices program at the library, and the community outreach coordi nator at the History Center. Both organizations have projects that could potentially house an archive of local access TV shows. The library is creating a local historical digital archive. The history center is creating a local story-telling creating and archiving facility. Both sounded interested and positive about including PEG programs, but haven’t given a go-ahead. However Ksenia at the History Center had a good idea. She said they had used CAP grants to pay Cornell to do media conversion. Media conversi on is a big issue in creating any kind of historical access archive, as many old shows are on videotape and paying for media conversion is expensive. For example, I spoke to Mimi Melegrito, who has 25 years of Robin Palmer’s programs. She is aware that amo ng these tapes are interviews with many local notables, including Dorothy Cotton. But she has no resources to do media conversion. I am sure there are quite a few other producers or relatives of producers in the same boat. Jean and Bob Finley, for example, did over 2500 interview programs in the 1990s with reps of local groups. So I think it would be a good line of inquiry to see whether CAP would consider a grant for access producers to convert their media, pre-conditioned on having a local archive capability for them to be sent to. Pod-casting: I attended a podcasting seminar at the library. I saw at least one person who had done some preparation on having his own access interview show and then gave up. Obviously, he realized it would be easier to do a podcast.  PEGASYS Equipment Maintenance and Repair I need a consult from Rich to get our studio audio delay routed properly after volunteers poked a bunch of audio mixer buttons and took the delay off -line – I promise to take notes this time!  Cablecasting Policies Charter’s access policies and program paperwork have still not been issued to us. I changed the organization of the cablecast schedule a bit for the summer season, increasing the number of scheduled plays of shows from 4 to 6 and programming evening blocks that are then copied and pasted into afternoons and mornings. The result is more scheduled plays for producers and more predictability for viewers of when programming will appear. Before, I was filling in all blanks on a random TBA basis the night before. Now the schedule is much more full, so less TBAs are needed. Still enough for 1-time shows, though.