Editor’s note: This commentary is Scooter MacMillan, of Burlington, who worked for years as a reporter and editor at weekly and daily newspapers in western North Carolina and Georgia, after which he was the marketing director at the State Theatre of Georgia, the Springer Opera House.
“I’m taking my toys and going home.” You might hear this shouted by a fussy child.
It’s not something you’d expect to hear from your cable provider. Yet, this seems like what Xfinity/Comcast is saying to its cable customers in Vermont.
They can’t literally take their toys and go home. They’re required to share access to cable by the contract allowing them to use publicly owned utility poles to string their wires and airways to broadcast the digital signals that so many of us rely on to get our entertainment and other digital service. Part of that agreement is that cable companies across the country will allocate a small percentage of the fees that from cable fees to help communities set up stations to produce and broadcast programs that are created by the public. These programs run on stations that are called public access or educational programing. Also included on these stations are video recordings of all sorts of government public meetings.
A Sept. 21 article from the Brattleboro Reformer reprinted in VTDigger a couple of weeks ago describes, in sometimes confusing legalese, a court case that illustrates how this and other requirements seems to have gotten the cable company’s knickers in a knot. Making public access channels easily accessible to the public, the Comcast suit argues, would violate the company’s right to freedom of speech.
Really? Telling your customers what is being broadcast on your system – and when – intrudes on your free speech?
Trying to find the public channels is difficult. Xfinity/Comcast does as little as it can to keep you from finding these channels.
If you search the schedule provided by the cable company, way down almost at the penultimate end of the channels, you’ll find channels 15, 16 and 17. On the schedule they are identified as Local 1, Educational Access Programming and Government Access Programming. And Xfinity/Comcast won’t tell you what programs are scheduled to air on these channels. You might check out the schedule with your remote to confirm that what I’ve written is true. You’ll find that searching for what’s being broadcast on your public access and educational channels is an exercise in frustration.
Xfinity/Comcast does not omit the schedules for the public access channels all over the country. Some states and communities have struck a deal that requires their cable company to include these schedules. So, the cable company does have the ability to share these schedules with you.
The cable company seems to be acting like a petulant child who’s been told to do something they don’t want to do, reluctantly doing the minimal amount that they have to do to not get in trouble. Is the Xfinity/Comcast’s lack of cooperation due to a fear that the public access channels are going to take over the major share of the standard channel programming? Probably not. Their lack of cooperation with sharing the schedule is probably due to being forced share some of the cable fees for the use of public airways and utility lines.
Access to these public airways and utility lines for cable service results in a virtual money-making machine. It seems like the cable company should not only give us access to the cable for public meetings and publicly produced programming, but also share the schedule of when and what is playing on those three channels. Wouldn’t that be the adult thing to do?
