LA City Hall

New money and a new opportunity
It's hard to tell exactly, because the cable companies are providing their current support (studio facilities and equipment, training, air time) for public access programming on an "in-kind," rather than a cash basis, but the best-informed opinion on the subject says that Time Warner, Cox, and Charter are now providing Los Angeles City residents with somewhere between four and eight million dollars a year for public access programming.

At the behest of Verizon and AT&T, which say they want to offer next-generation video distribution services (respectively, FiOS fiber-to-the-home/business and Lightspeed hybrid fiber-coax) in competition with legacy cable hybrid co-ax systems, the State of California, by passing Assembly Bill 2987 (now, having been passed and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, known as the Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act of 2006 [DIVCA]) has taken away from cities the right to franchise video service providers and given that power to the State of California itself.

Cable companies, and their new telco competitors, will, after January 1, 2009, no longer be required to provide in-kind services to city residents under local municipally-negotiated franchise agreements. Rather, they will be required under DIVCA to remit one per cent of their gross revenues to the cities for PEG programming (Public, Educational and Governmental).

Experts at this sort of thing are estimating that under DIVCA, the City of Los Angeles will, instead of receiving between four and eight million dollars in in-kind support for public access programming, receive approximately $4.6 million to fund its PEG operations. This represents one per cent of the estimated $460 million in revenue taken in by all cable and telco video distribution services in the City.

The transition from revenue transfers of indeterminate amount from cable companies to a cash payment of over four-and-half-million dollars from all video service providers offers the City of Los Angeles and its residents a great opportunity to completely restructure the production and distribution of locally-produced public access content in a way that leverages this newly-available cash flow with state-of-the-art technology to deliver more and better public access programming delivered in more and better ways to an even wider audience than is presently the case.

On a personal note
I produced hundreds of hours of public access programming in the early to mid-nineties. I provided the talent and my own production skills. I used studio space and camera equipment provided by Century Cable and, when it sold out to Adelphia, by Adelphia Communications.

Producing public access programming in the day involved making an appointment for a two-hour block of studio time weeks in advance. Once the program was shot, editing it involved more waiting for access to primitive editing equipment. Scheduling the "airing" of the program involved weeks more of waiting, culminating in a single showing of the program, often at an obscure hour on a constantly-shifting and hard-to-publicize channel number. Reaching a wider audience than a single cable company's subscribers involved making multiple copies of ¾" video tape and "bicycling" them around town or mailing them around the country.

Despite my futile hope that my interviewing skills would rapidly, or eventually, pave my way to a big and growing audience and a steady, well-paying job in mainstream media, as far as I can recall, the only one of my fellow public access producers who enjoyed that kind of success was the host of a program that featured interviews with mostly-naked porn stars talking and acting just as dirtily as they could. The deliberately-raunchy host of that public access series rose as high in show business as a single guest spot on Seinfeld, playing to type as a seedy slimeball.

Towards the middle of the 1990s, I turned my attention to developing and implementing remote Internet voting systems and stopped producing public access programming. At the beginning of this century, as the technology making it possible, and then easier came into existence and I was able to access and make use of it, I began producing video for the Internet.

As you can see by visiting the Etopia News web site at www.etopiamedia.net, I now routinely create video interview programming with a $350 Casio Exilim Ultra Slim Card Camera and a desktop computer that's goes from recording to global online distribution within hours at no cost at all, with better sound and picture quality than I could achieve during the two-or-three month cycle of waiting-taping-editing-scheduling-and-waiting that was and, I assume, still is, characteristic of legacy public access programming.

Instead of being available to the resourceful few able to find a one-off cablecast, the video I now shoot is available on-demand to millions of viewers world wide.

It's not just me
I am not, obviously, the only person doing this. Millions of people and organizations, from "Lonelygirl15" to Viacom to every one of the countless Democratic candidates for president now use online video aggregation sites such as YouTube, Veoh, Google Video, MySpace, Brightcove, and, soon, Joost, to distribute videos shot on their cell phones, camcorders, and webcams, or generated as animation on computers.

The search for business models, advertisers, and the best and/or most popular video programming, along with fights over copyright infringement, privacy violations, and the proper division of revenues, is now a constant focus of mainstream business and cultural discussion.

In a world characterized by an immense and growing diversity of sources and distribution methods for user-generated video content, using the $4.6 million dollars that will be coming to the City of Los Angeles from Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Cox, and Charter to support public access programming by giving it back to any or all of these companies to continue operating the antiquated, anachronistic, and inefficient legacy studios they now provide for this purpose would be a very bad idea.

Wither public access?
One might indeed ask, "What need is there now at all for public access programming?"

Public access programming was created and spread as a way of giving a voice to the voiceless, and airtime to the dispossessed, at a time when there were only a few television channels and barriers to getting programming on them were so high that only major broadcasting corporations could surmount them.

Since that time, cable television channels have proliferated, and, in recent years, digital cameras and the Internet have so lowered the barriers to user-generated content that millions of people are now doing what only tens or hundreds of people could do during most of the classical era of public access programming, namely: express themselves visually to an large or small audience of viewers interested in what they had to say at a cost that they could afford..

Using the cash the state-franchisees will be required to pay to cities to support public access programming to shore up the broken and obsolete system still maintained by incumbent providers and/or to be created by new entrant telcos would waste both good money and a great opportunity to expand even further the ability of all people to communicate with others through sight and sound.

Getting in on the real action
Also to be taken into account is the fact that already now huge corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Intel, many computer makers, and all major media companies are aggressively seeking the Holy Grail of Internet/television convergence, whereby millions of video-streaming websites can deliver their content directly to today's biggest and highest resolution television screens.

A new company called Joost, created by the people who built the voice (and video)-over-IP Skype system, promises to integrate the Internet and television viewing in a comprehensive way, adding social networking features such as collaborative filtering to a seamless system for the delivery of millions of online channels to mainstream television sets.

The emergence of technology like this is an argument for using the money from the state-authorized video providers to build and maintain an organization that would provide training (much of it in the form of online, interactive video instruction); low-cost, high-quality video cameras; computers and editing software; broadband Internet access (perhaps involving the new, municipally-facilitated [but not financed] wireless broadband infrastructure that I advocated during my 2002 campaign for Mayor of the San Fernando Valley and which Mayor Villaraigosa has now finally said he supports deploying by 2009 for the uploading AND distribution of public access/user-generated content); and support in producing and publicizing content using one or more of the aforementioned platforms (such as Veoh, Google Video, YouTube, Brightcove, or Joost) to host and stream a virtually-unlimited amount of Web 2.0 public access programming from Los Angeles residents.

Paying its own way
All of these video aggregation and distribution platforms are experimenting with ways of providing their content either for free, with advertising, or on a pay-per-view basis. Is there any reason why public access programming generated through a Public Access Online Los Angeles (PAOLA) structure couldn't also be offered, at the discretion of its producers, for free, with advertising, or on a pay-per-view basis?

Revenues generated by advertising-supported and pay-per-view public access programming could be divided among the City of Los Angeles, the producers of the content, and PAOLA itself.

Using advertising and even pay-per-view to create a PAOLA that was more than self-sustaining when using only material produced and submitted by Los Angeles residents could prepare the way for opening PAOLA to contributors from other California or U.S. locales, or, indeed, anyone in the world.

produce locally; distribute globally
Those interested only in watching programming by Angelenos or about Los Angeles could easily use the filtering technology built into the platform to find what they wanted and only that. So too could they and others use the same tools to access locally-produced-and relevant content from any other place on earth.

Like any other globally-based Web 2.0 media organization, revenues could be divided among producers and the aggregating organization itself, to support its staff and expand its capabilities. If it became successful enough, it could issue stock and stock options to its contributing producers and talent and go public.

connecting to legacy delivery systems
To make public access programming available to those video distribution service subscribers whose connection to the global information network does not include the Internet, and who can only receive video programming as part of an arrangement with a cable company or telco video service provider, or to those who are Internet-connected but would prefer to receive some or all of their video programming directly to their television(s) through a cable or telco video service connection, there is no reason why the best, or some, of the vast amount of video programming available from local public access producers online under this proposal couldn't be converted to the appropriate video format and, transmitted directly from the servers hosting it to the cable and telco video distribution head-ends, to be made available from there in "traditional" form to cable and telco subscribers.

Which programs would be cablecast/phonecast through these standard connections could be determined by metadata/keyword algorithms, collaborate filtering by online viewers, randomly, or by some combination of these methods, according to local preferences. As part of their commitment to their subscribers, cable and telco video distribution service providers could receive and transmit the signals containing this public access programming using some small part of the increasingly-prodigious channel capacity of their networks, including high-definition channels.

If the programming were of such quality as to attract new, or retain existing, subscribers, the cable/telco companies might even expand the extent to which they use their infrastructure to deliver this programming, thereby serving both public access producers, their viewers, and their own bottom line.

building-in ways to prepare for the future
This entire discussion has been informed by a single, simple idea: that new money for public access should go to build a system of production and distribution that uses the latest and best technologies and business practices to serve public access' original goal of allowing everyone who wants to to produce content that is informative, entertaining, inspiring, compelling, or boring, trivial, and/or meretricious, at minimal expense to them and with the prospect of making it available to the widest possible audience of viewers who might want to see it.

The PAOLA system outlined here tries to do that, as of February 20, 2007. But, at the earliest, the approach set forth here, or one similar to it, wouldn't go into operation before January 1, 2009. While this paradigm tries to take advantage of what is available now to create a robust public access operation, no doubt the next two years will see further evolution in the speed, power, capability, and cost of the digital video and production tools that are available.

Somehow, a better way of integrating the latest in emerging technologies and operational practices with on-going but themselves-evolving goals needs to be developed, along with the social practices necessary to make the entire process a democratic and participatory one. Building PAOLA now and maintaining it into the indefinite future might be one way of rudimentarily approaching that desired state of affairs.

for everyone who wants to be a producer as well as a consumer
Joost announced on February 20, 2007, that it has signed an agreement with Viacom to distribute much of its video content for free (to viewers) on the new Joost system. Presumably, it will be supported by advertising and the revenues earned will be divided between Viacom and Joost. Why couldn't 40,000 Angelenos producing video for PAOLA have the same deal?