History of Community Media and CCTV Center for Media & Democracy

Welcome to a history of CCTV. This was a timeline. This is a timeline that we prepared for the 40th anniversary. And it made sense to go back to the myths of time to look at the very beginning of the industry, the telephone telecommunications industry and the broadcast which became the cable industry. Today we see those industries as intersected. But there was a time when the telephone was its own invention and radio and TV were their own invention. So we start in 1869. Actually Alexander Graanbell invented the telephone earlier than 1869. And I I guess the first thing that he said over the phone to his assistant was, "Mr. Watson, come here." Because he had spilled acid on him. So that was in fact the first telephone call. And those um patents went on to be um purchased by small telephone companies all over the United States. So cities had their own exchanges. They were not interconnected with each other. You couldn't make long-distance phone calls. You could only make local phone calls. And the long-distance telephone call came much later. It came in the um early early 1900s. And what's interesting about that which I'm going to just pause because around the same time 1895 um Maronei who was an Italian inventor developed wireless telegraphy or telegraphy which was the radio and in 1901 he he sent the first transatlantic communications. Now this is wireless unlike telephone. It was wireless broadcast and that became the basis of not only radio international radio networks but also television networks. What happened around the first world war is that the US government basically appropriated Marone's patent and made it illegal for anyone but the US government to transmit messages. And after the first world war, Maronei wanted to be able to resume his patent and the US government wouldn't let him. And so he sued and the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the US government and invalidated Marone's patent. So that's an interesting story about um what happened to the inventor of radio. And then on the te the telephone side, what was really interesting is that um Theodore Vale, who actually had a summer place up in Lynenville, you can see the historic marker um up in Lynenville in Vermont, but he um wanted to buy up all these local exchanges and integrate them into a national telephone system and to um own the the devices and to control the national network. And the US government sued him and they um basically came up, this was around a little after the first world war. They come came up with this agreement called the Kingsbury agreement which let Theodore Vale create what became the National Telephone Network. In exchange um for him having this national exclusive right to have a monopoly, he was obliged to make sure that telephone service extended to every corner of the country. Well, by the 1960s, there were parts of Vermont that still did not have telephone service. So, I'm not sure how well he did with that monopoly exchange, but those are some examples of how um those early technologies intersected with government regulation and um capital. In 1888, Thomas Edison um created the first film 40 frames a second, the first film camera, and the Lumier brothers in 1895 um speeded that up to 16 frames a second. And in fact, they did some of their early work right here in Burlington, Vermont, the famous Lumier Studios where we um their events by Burlington Beer Company, I think. And part of the reason the Lumier brothers were here was because it was so cloudy all the time. So, it was a relatively good place just like Rochester, Vermont was a Rochester, New York was a great place for film um the film industry, the actual photo film industry to be developed by Kodak and the first motion picture was called Round Pay Garden Scene and it was film in Leeds, England. So all over um the the world, film was taking the world by storm. At the Paris World's Fair in 1900, television um the word television was coined and it was the birth of what was then called distance vision. And I just have always found this quote by Nath Nathaniel Hawthorne to be very precient. And this was before this era. And he said, "Is it a fact or have I dreamt it that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. So just think, you know, think about the internet today and it is this this giant nerve that is vibrating and we're all vibrating and he um he dreamt it but that became a fact. So I did mention here in 1913 the Kingsbury agreement allowed um AT&T to interconnect local exchanges and promise for universal service. So that was 1913. And then there was this young man [clears throat] Pho who is is credited with creating the first TV broadcast system. And what is so interesting about him is that he developed this at the age of 15. And he he had been thinking about this. He was a a farmer and he'd been thinking about how to send signals using broadcast, right? Radio waves. And apparently he was sewing fields. So you know the fields of these long furrows and there were seeds in the furrows and that gave him this idea about how television radio waves could create a visual signal. Now, there was kind of a big hop between him imagining that when he was 15 and inventing the TV broadcast system, but he drew this drawing when he was 15 and he gave it to his science teacher at the time. And why that turned out to be important is that when he was um you know getting money to build the TV broadcast system which had all these components. So you needed to get patents for each one of the components. It's not like you built a TV and a transmission system and you turned it on and you were good to go. You had to get patents and you had to file the patents. And um the guy who oh David I forget his name but he started one of the networks and as part of starting the network maybe it was NBC he bought up all the radio patents. He he he was like a shark and he would buy up all the radio patents so he controlled them so only he could make money from radio sets, right? and he was trying to do the same thing for television. And he was constantly trying to sue Farnsworth for breach of patent. And Farnsworth was in court contesting the fact that he had invented this television broadcast system and he should be allowed to have the patents. and the patent um back room people found his science teacher who had this piece of paper in his wallet from when Farnsworth was 15 which showed that he actually had come up with this idea way before um Sarnoff David Sarnoff um came after him to contest his patents. Okay. So 1922 Nanuk of the North. So Robert Flity and Francis his wife who doesn't get a lot of credit but should they produced a series of films including Nook of the North which is very famous which were sort of the first documentaries the the the term wasn't coined until 1926 by John Greersonen but Flity and his team um staged these exotic cultures including Nanuk of the North and then there was some tropical Tahesian films and they came under criticism from people like John Greersonen because they were staged. They weren't really documentaries. And John Greersonen is really the person that got me into the work that we do here at Community Television because he was a Scottish minister's son in Great Britain who was hired to um produce films for the British Empire Marketing Board. So the British Empire was vast, it was global and they produced a series of films to show their beneficence, how great Britain was and all the wonderful things that were happening in the empire. One of the very famous ones is called Songs of Salon, which is a beautiful film about tea production in India. And they were propaganda films before the word was coined. And then they ha they hired Greersonen to create the British film board because at that time during the Second World War the Nazi propaganda machine was quite strong and very um scary to people who weren't um who were fighting the Nazis. So the British film board hired Greersonen to produce a whole series of to create it itself and to produce a series of films to unite the British country meaning Scotland, Wales and England which at that time even though it seems like it's not that big a mass was very split by class and very split by country and Ireland as well. And so very famous films were produced in that era by Greersonen and Company including Night Mail which is a beautiful film. Another these were beautifully produced films about the mail service going through the entire country delivering the mail and uniting the country. Um Odden wrote the the script. It's a kind of poem pros poem. Um Benjamin Britain did the music. These were young artists at the time who became very famous and the the films that they made were really designed to create a sense of common British identity. Another film they made during that period the war period was a film about what was happening at noon on a particular day in four different country in four different parts of the country and it was again meant to unify. So some people were in London, one thing was probably in Scotland and they were all over the country, very different urban rural and they were meant to create again this sense of we're all in this together. We're not that different from each other. So hold that thought on Greersonen. I'm gonna just go back to the fact that um in 1927 the radio act of 1927 was created by the US government and that defined spectrum as an asset to be licensed for the public interest, convenience and necessity. Now this is a really really seinal idea because capital is what creates the wealth to build the assets like radio stations and television networks. But this basic premise that these licenses would be issued for you to invest in and then generate money for the public interest, convenience and necessity. Implicit in that is a public benefit that this is for the public. This is not just an instrument or a tool to make money. So that's a really key concept as we move forward in history. And in 1934, the Communications Act, the 1934 Communications Act was enacted by Congress, which created the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, which was per its purpose was to regulate broadcast and telephone service. There had been this kind of like crazy gold rush pioneering thing happening and it became time to put in some regulation so that the public interest, convenience and necessity would be served and that people would receive service not just because they had the money for service but because the needs were there and that this was a way of advancing the interests of the people of the United States. So this is what's happening in the broadcast world and in 1936 the first live TV transmission um from the top of the Empire State Building was done by RCA and um Herbert Hoover who was the secretary of commerce later became the president at this time said you know some glorious thing about this is the beginning of this distance vision that we can all celebrate and look into the future. and he w he wasn't wrong. The first um television set I think we'll see wasn't made quite yet, but there was definitely live TV transmission. So, in the in the intervening time before the Second World War and into the Second World War, as I mentioned, there were these um sort of amazing films made by the Nazi propaganda machine. And 1935 was The Triumph of the Will produced by Lenny Reefenstall. And there were several of these films that are amazing films. If you really um ever stop to watch them, they're incredible to see. The triumph of the will starts with these clouds and the sky and emerging from the clouds is this tremendous airplane which they must have shot with another airplane next to it. I mean, I I'm not even sure how they did it. And there's this airplane and it just emerges from the heavens and presumably Hitler's on this plane and then it lands and it moves on to these mass rallies like thousands of people, thousands of like very enthusiastic Nazis. And um it's it's kind of like the um Olympic ceremony when the Olympic Games were in China with this just you know hundreds thousands of people doing the same thing in unison. You just get this just immense sense of the power of this nation from this show of force and people. So that was what John Greersonen was trying to was hired to combat. And around this period also was um a lot of thinking and talking about documentary which Greersonen had coined. And one of the sort of lines of documentary development was Ziega Vertov and his peers who coined the term kino pravda which meant film truth which was very different from flarity's nanuk of the north. It was about what is happening in real time with real people. And one of the the important films that Gersonen did make I think it was probably after the war we'll see. I think it comes up soon is housing problems. And housing problems, they actually was the first time that a film camera was taken on location into a public housing apartment in Glasgow. And you know, they're not like these cameras. I mean, Aubrey can show you what these cameras look like. You pretty much know what these cameras look like. You you can use your phone. These are big, clunky cameras and big lights. And so on location shooting had never been done but these filmmakers were so dedicated to showing really what was happening in real time that that is the tradition from which all of our work comes. So in 1939 John Greersonen was hired by the National Film Board of Canada. Well actually by the government of Canada to create the National Film Board of Canada. Canada had a similar challenge to Great Britain except that it was geographically very different. And the challenge was how do we create a sense of common identity? Canada was 3,000 miles long and a 100 miles wide filled with all different kinds of people from one coast to the other that had been united not very long before this by the railroads. And so they, the government of Canada felt that documentary film was a tool for creating national identity. And in fact, Greersonen wrote quite a bit about this and about in in reference and in reflection to the Nazi propaganda movement, he felt that propaganda, which was a tool for promoting this idea of democracy and that it shouldn't be appropriated just for fascist purposes, that in fact you could use the electronic media as a way of uniting people behind key ideas. And this is his quote from an essay he wrote in 1945 called Search Light on Democracy. And when I read this quote, when I read these essays and when I read this quote, it it totally changed my life. Here's the quote. Once good feelings and good ideas move like wildfire across the democratic sky, we are halfway toward building a community worth living in. Let me say that one more time. Once good feelings and good ideas move like wildfire across the democratic sky, we are halfway toward building a community worth living in. This is a very powerful idea about the role that media can play and in this case electronic media which was you know a new phenomenon. And so these were the people that had were inventing not just the physical medium of radio and broadcast TV and film, but applying it and applying it with a value system that was about pro promoting positive social values, community connectivity, generative community life. So in [clears throat] the 1950s and the 1970s documentary film movement expands and it's influenced by all of these thinkers cinema verite which is another way of saying kinoprada film truth direct cinema the newsreel collective newsreel collective is actually godparents of CCTV these were a group of uh filmmakers in the 60s who took film and actually covered all the countercultural things that were happening and Ros Payne, we have a great video in our archives of Ros Payne and John Douglas who were part of that collective talking about their work. In 1948, CATV, Community Antenna Television, brought reception to rural America. So, CATV wasn't called cable TV quite yet. It was called Community Antenna TV. And the reason that it started in rural America is because most cities had TV channels because that's where the content was being produced. The ABC, the NBC, and the CBS affiliates. There were three major networks at that time. And they had there was a national broadcast and then there were local affiliates. So if you lived in a city, you could get off the air broadcast on your TV which had an antenna these channels and you could get other channels like in New York City for example we had we had um W which was channel 9, WPIX which was channel 11 and then we had public TV which um PBS I think that's what it was called then and that was on channel 13. So we had a lot of channels in addition to CBS, NBC, and ABC. But rural America didn't have the reception because in a state like Vermont or in Ohio or in Pennsylvania, there were hills and hills block TV reception. So there were a bunch of guys and women probably, but probably mostly men who wanted to sell television sets. And there was no market for television sets because the new, you know, the first color TV came out in 1955, but they're black and white TVs and no one would buy them because they couldn't get any reception. So these were the people, these mom and pops, who created the first antenna on hills that then had a physical wire that went into everybody's home. And that was the birth of cable TV. So over that time from the 40s until the early 80s, cable TV was a rural phenomenon and it spread all across because once I mean it's a pretty simple technology. It's an antenna and some cable. It's not I mean none of these technologies are very complicated once they're figured out, right? So it's easy for me to say, you know, Farnsworth took him a long time to come to market. But in any event, cable TV proliferated in rural America. 1955, the first color TV set sells for $795. We did not have a color TV in my house until I went to college. So I remember 1979 we had a color TV. Until then it was all black and white. And then the really big breakthrough was 1967 the Sony DV 2400 portac was invented and it put video in the hands of people for the first time. Now I just want to point out 1967 the Sony porta the Sony portaack was about this big. It it was not portable but it was so much more portable than the television equipment that was studiobound. So, it allowed you to get out of the studio. I mean, in my high school, we had one and a little black and white camera that was used to record like um just like classroom classroom events. The first time I ever saw myself on video was in high school and I think that it was the guidance counselor and she had recorded everybody talking in the class and it was then we had to watch it to see how we interacted in a group and that was the first time I ever saw myself on video and it was the most single most mortifying experience of my life to see how much I interrupted how I mean this does not have to do with the history of TV but in my life the history of my life with TV it was very powerful medium to see yourself reflected for the first time. I mean, it's something we just take for granted. No one even thinks about it today, but imagine being able to see yourself, a regular person, not on a TV studio for the first time on portable video equipment. It boggles the mind what what like huge insights that that created for people. So, so the Sony Portaac allowed Challenge for Change, which was a project of the National Film Board of Canada to happen and it was created by the National Film Board to tell the stories by the people and to speak directly to their government. And you know again Greersonen was still the head of the film board but in the intervening times many documentaries had been made by the National Film Board of Canada and then they would be given to a person who would take a film canister and a film projector literally and go to church basement all across the country. So that's and people would watch films once a week and these are films made by the film board. So again, there wasn't a lot of content on television and people went to the movies quite a bit, but to see these movies about their own community was a big draw. But there started to be complaints that you're actually not showing our community. You're not showing what's really happening in these communities. I mean, it's great to see something about curling. It's awesome. But you know there are some serious problems in the indigenous communities and there are some issues in urban and poor rural communities. So the film board responded with this challenge for change called societal in French and it was devoted to using media as a tool for social change. There were several of these films. There are the children of Fogo Island, you are on Indian land, VTR Stacr Rosedale. These films were a social process. And so what would happen is that a group of people, the the the brigade, the youth brigade of challenge for change who had equipment would go into a neighborhood in Montreal and you would watch this if you saw this in VTR St. Jacques. They'd go into a neighborhood in Montreal. Um St. Jacques of the neighborhood and they'd go around interviewing people with their camera and they'd say, "So, Aubrey, tell us what concerns you about what's happening in your community." And you, someone would say, "Well, I think we need daycare." Someone else would say, "I think we need um a health care system. I need a job." Everybody was talking about all the things that concern them. And then these organizers would say, "Okay, on Wednesday at 7 o'clock, we're going to screen this. So come and watch. Well, of course, this was, you know, a new thing. So, everyone come to the community hall and they would watch these interviews and realize without anyone having to say anything that they had common cause, that they all were concerned about different aspects of improving their neighborhood. And from that they were able to use this convening as a basis of breaking people into groups to talk about how are we going to get a new daycare setup? How are we going to improve our health care system? What are we going to do to employ young people and get them ready to work? And it became a tool for social change. So George Stony, who is known as the father of public access, had been hired to be the executive producer for a couple years of this challenge for change project. He was a documentary filmmaker in his own right. and he wasn't really that convinced that video was an effective tool. But when he saw how video was used as a way of engaging people in conversation as a prelude to creating some kind of social change, light bulbs went off. and he used this idea even though he was there for two years but he used this idea to bring back this concept to NYU which we'll look at in a second New York University and begin to train the first generation of people to go across the country to start what became public access. the first channels were were kind of underway even in 1968 because what I don't I did not list here is that the FCC had actually created some rules requiring channels to be set aside for local origination and so in communities in Virginia and Charlottesville and also Brattleboro and St. Shsbury, the first public access TV channels started to go live. the combination of this portable equipment, the countercultural movements, the FCC allowing for PEG access channels and five minutes of free airtime at that time and these local public access channels starting up led to this kind of perfect moment where several colleges and universities ities started media programs. One of them was in Antioch College in 1969 and in 1970 at Goddard College in Vermont, the alternative media program was launched and at the same time they held an alternative media conference which was attended by 2,000 people. Just imagine 2,000 people coming to Goddard College in Planefield, Vermont. And around that time, and that was TV people, radio people, gorilla media people, filmmakers, uh, music executives, like all kinds of people from all over the country, possibly the world, came to God for that conference. And in 1973, WGDR went on the air at Goddard. It's now a nonprofit. It's not run as part of Goddard. still exists. And then in 1972 at NYU, as I mentioned, George Stony and his work partner Red Burns started the alternative the alternate media center. It's actually not correct there. It's not the alternative media center. I just learned this. I just learned this after 40 years. It was called the alter alternate media center. And the purpose was to train students and citizens to use public access access TV to share power. And from that um center they received grant funding to create an internship program. And the deal was that these interns would go to cable systems around the country and the grant program would pay half the salary and the cable company would pay the other half salary. And at this time the cable industry was kind of into public access and local origination. There was this kind of golden age of local origination channels like locally produced content by cable company mom and pops. They were just small companies. There were, in fact, in Vermont in 1984, right before we started um CCTV, there were 50 cable companies that stir serve the state subscribers. Today, I think they're 10. And of course, Comcast is the is the big one, and it serves 90% of of the state's subscribers. So, there's this great quote, Sydney W. Dean in 1971, who was a public access visionary. So long as cable systems can control their content, they will attempt to deny market access to all other producers and distributors of print and electronic communications. He wasn't wrong. And then in 1976, those interns who were all over the country and some of them I mean many of them are still living today and still work in public access, believe it or not, almost 80 years old. They created the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers and that was an effort to continue to coalesce around these issu these values of public access and to create a sort of a magnet for these activists who were popping up all over the country, not only as cable public access coordinators in partnership with cable companies, but video collector perspectives. Um, Rain Rain Dance Corporation, uh, Top Value TV. I mean, there they were in Denver, they were in the Midwest, they're in California, they're in New York, they're I mean, all over the country. It was just hopping with community media. And that's just the electronic broadcast. I mean, I mentioned the filmmakers and the documentary makers. I mean, there is some fantastic work going on during this period. Alas, in 1979, Midwest Video um went to uh the the Supreme Court with a suit against the United States, against the FCC, saying that this requirement of these public access channels were an infringement of their First Amendment right. and the Supreme Court sided with them and struck down the FCC public access access mandate saying that this was an infringement of the cable company's free speech rights. So that meant that the NLCP people, these young activists who were committed to freedom of expression, diversity of of ideas, community communication through electronic media needed to get to work on the legislative side. And luckily for them, um, there had been a lot of work underpinning this effort to get some laws passed because George Stony, who was the sort of the the Johnny Apples Seed of getting everybody to make video, worked with Red Burns, who was very savvy when it came to litigation. So, working in the background of all of these things, we're now about to go into the CCTV part of the history, but I just wanted to add that in the background were a series of bills being introduced to um give localities, municipalities authority to regulate cable and to provide things like public access. And that um really started when that 1979 um Midwest video case went into the works. And there were some incredible champions. The United Church of Christ, Reverend Everett Parker, who worked tirelessly in Congress to advocate for open airways and open channels. But it didn't stop any of this incredibly generative community media making that that Supreme Court case. It still went on. And in fact, when we got the idea to start CCTV, and the idea to start CCTV came from this whole story that I've just told you. You know, it came from reading John Greersonen's essays, realizing that this was actually a thing that you could hold these values in advance access to the means of production and distribution. It involved learning about the National Film Board of Canada, finding out about Challenge for Change, tracking down George Stony, and at the time that um I left UVM with my degree in anthropology and I wanted to get my hands on video equipment. I couldn't anymore because I was not at UVM. But I knew all these things about public access. This thing called public access which was not required. There was no federal requirement for it. But there was just enough of it going on that I went to the cable company. It was Cox Cable at the time. This is a little bit of a famous story. And I knocked on the door and I said, you know, "Hi, I'm here to borrow your camera." And they said, "Well, we have a camera, but it's not we don't lend it to anyone." And there was literally a closet, marked closet on it. They opened it and inside was this big, heavy, clunky, I don't even think it was a portaack piece of equipment. And they said, "Well, that's what we have." And I I left that day. I remember walking out the door and thinking, [sighs and gasps] "Okay, I've got to now become an advocate because the only way that we're going to get our hands on any of video equipment is if we fight for it." And so at that point, I worked at this great place called Resources. It was a little production company, you know, kind of commercial production company, and they were so generous. to say, "Let me use their typewriters and computers and copers." And I made flyers and I put them all over the neighborhood and put them all over the city and set up a meeting at the library and people came. I said, "There's this thing called public access. Is are you interested?" And people came and you know the library people came, the school people came and people is Burlington. It was you know the beginning of the Bernie Sanders era. It was a very exciting time. And and also this young lawyer Sam Press came who had grown up in Burlington and had recently moved back who was very excited about the idea and he was willing to help us to advocate with the public service board who regulated at that time cable TV contracts, franchises, certificates of public good and cable TV prices. They were still regulating prices. So, in the midst of all of this, there was research to be done to find out about what other people were doing. Um, one of the women on on Bernie's, so Bernie had a task force, the mayor's task force on cable TV in which um the outcome of that was Cox Cable paid the city a million dollars not to municipalize its c its cable TV service. And on that was a woman I met who had gone to school and studied under George Stony at NYU. So that was terribly exciting. And then there were these conferences and events and there was an event at Temple University that I went to and I was just reflecting how did I even know that was happening because I don't know how you find found I don't remember how we found out things were happening. There was no internet. So, I can't tell you how I knew to go to Temple University, but I did. And that's where I met the Tigers, the Paper Tiger TV people. Dee Hack, Diana Austoa, and uh Karen Rogoff were just a few of the people that had created this TV series that they produced in New York between 1981 and 1986, which was dedicated to smashing the myths of the information age. And Dee Hack, who is the founder, who is still going strong, wrote, "It is one thing to critique the mass media and rail against their abuses. [clears throat] It's quite another to create viable alternatives." And I remember meeting these women and hearing about Paper Tiger. And again, it was like when I read that Greersonen essay, I just thought, "Oh, these are my people. This is so exciting. And that that that kind of got us and what we were trying to do in this this river of the mainstream alternative media. It connected us to what was happening around the country was so so exciting. And we in the meantime, so that was kind of the spring of probably at this point it was the spring of 19, it's 198384. The mayor's task force was 1983. And Cox Cable needed to go get a rate increase. So they had to go to the public service board. And Sam Press, our lawyer, he educated himself about how to represent yourself at the Vermont Public Service Board. It's now called the Public Utility Commission, but it was called the Vermont Public Service Board. And one of the really great things about this process in this state and in other states is that if you're a citizen and you have a reason to intervene in this case, if you have a a a purpose that the public service board needed to hear about in their consideration of this contract and this agreement with this cable company, you are given intervenor status. You are given party status. If you can make a case why you should be a party just like the cable company, just like the state, you have equal status. And this is before environmental causes, environmental action groups became part of utility cases. We were among the very first public advocates and we got part status and we had this list of what public access should be from someone one of those interns probably Sue Busky who's still a consultant and was one of the George's interns a list of what there should be and what public access examples of what public access in Boston was was like because I had gone to Boston at that point and I'd gone New York and I'd kind of seen what was happening in those incipient places and we filed testimony and we said here's the sort of ten commandments of public access and Cox Cable came out with this flyer in the middle of this case the proceedings because Cox Cable had public access channels in other parts of the country. This was not surprising or new to them. And they issued this pamphlet just right in the middle of the proceedings. There's like a week of actual hearings where you sit on the stand and you're cross-examined. And they it was an insert in the Burlington Free Press and it said Cox Cable offers public access television. How great was that? So the public service board said, "Okay, good. Do that." And they ultimately Coxybull funded public access in Burlington, in Middbury, in Rutland, in Montpelier, and I always think it's one other place, but let's just say it's those four places. I think Randolph was part of it was part of Montpielar. So those were really the first going concerns. There had been access in Brattleboro and there had been access in St. Johnsbury in the 70s. But those were not still going at that time. So we we were able to obtain funding for these channels. And on um June 13th, 1984, CCTV premiered at the video cafe. We made we made video program not with the equipment of the cable company because they didn't have it yet but we brought the tape to them and they had this channel channel 8 and we went to the video cafe in Wiski which was um the sort of the garage of Dan Higgins who was one of the first CCTV people one of the founders he had been one of my teachers at UVM and great photographer great anthropologist a great document of Winski and we all gathered around. There's a picture of it in the hallway and it was 8:00 and the first program was this what is public access TV with some examples with a deep a paper tiger episode. So it was an hourong video we had put together and nothing happened flickered. Nothing happened. And we're waiting. About 45 minutes later, whoever the poor person at the cable company whose job it was to put that tape in that deck and transmit it, finally got it organized enough and we went on the air. And that was June 13th, 1984. And we were um this group, this kind of haphazard group that I described the first people that came to those meetings. I still have their names. sized in boxes, mailing labels, the newsletters that we made, the posters that we made, and we were organized to educate Burlington about public access TV and to petition the public service board to require channels and funding for these areas and that was approved. This is so exciting. And at the same time, Natir, who is responsible for our unbelievable archives, was starting to make video also. And he started to put programs on this channel 8, which soon became channel 15. And he didn't know, he thought CCTV was public access, but it was actually open to anyone. And at a Nam Chosky event, we were taping. Dan Higgins and I were taping and then Nat was taping and we both sort of looked at each other and said, "Who are you?" And that's how we met. And around that time, that same year, 1984, Congress passed the Cable Communications Act of 1984. And it was passed largely because during this time of the 80s, the cable wars were underway in the big cities of America. and the the fight and the battle to be the cable company that got the franchise for New York, for Boston, for Seattle, for Atlanta. Those places hadn't been cabled yet. And so these cable companies would come to these cities and they would fight and they would they would offer these unbelievable things in order to get the franchise, not only public access channels, but tree planting and like all kinds of crazy stuff. And it got so sort of out of control that the cable companies and the cities basically went to Congress and said, "We need to rationalize this process." And so it became a a federal law sponsored by Senator Goldwater and passed by Congress to create cable franchises fees and to enshrine public access. So that's when public access became a law. We had public access and many places did before it was ever a law. That period of the cable wars also led to some real consolidation of cable companies buying cable companies. And at that time in 1985, Cox Cable, which had served part of Vermont, I mean, as I said, there were 50 cable companies at that time. Many of them were mom and pops, very small. They sold their Vermont and Massachusetts systems to Green Mountain Cable for $37 million. And Green Mountain Cable was uh a a group of the management of the Vermont system. So the guys that ran the Vermont system and investors like it was described to me as doctors and dentists, like people who put some money in, $37 million to buy this cable system. And they were friendly guys. And they said, "What do you need? you know, we'll be as supportive as we possibly can, and they were very supportive of public access in general. Channel um 8 became channel 15. They hired a coordinator, name was Lori Murphy, to run the channel. We were asked if we wanted to run the channel, but we didn't want to work for the cable company. We wanted to maintain our independence as CCTV and public access was a going concern at the cable company, but it was a product. It was a creature of the cable company and we were very happy to um work with everybody. And in the meantime, CCTV was producing things. I mean we were not um paid [laughter] was still very much a volunteer effort but we were very innovative and we convened some of the first gatherings of the Vermont Access TV channels which are now known as Vermont Access Network. So there were five of us then six of us then nine of us then 10 of us. Now there 24 in Vermont Access Network 24 community media centers in all corners of the state. We arranged to go to Washington. CCTV goes to Washington. Uh Bernie was there as a He wasn't there yet as a congressman, was he? I don't remember. Senator Stafford was there rep. Yeah, Bernie was No, no, Bernie wasn't there yet. Senator Stafford, Representative Jeffs. We did pieces on them, which was We followed them around. We went to C-SPAN, which was fantastic, and we started to cover the Burlington Alderman meetings. Bernie was mayor, so he hired us to cover the Burlington Alderman's meetings. We did the Bernie Speaks to the community shows. We did Friday night TV and the governor's press conferences and election coverage. And then we started to um produce shows like the um like s we were producing these series but we we we did the development show for example and the housing show where we got all the entities that worked in innovative housing and development projects to pay us to produce little profiles of them. And then we produced the media makers and the decision makers which were very important because that was how we introduced ourselves to people so they would know who we were. So all of this was done not just to cover what was happening in the community but to also introduce this idea of public access and to build relationships in the media which was all the media folks were really supportive of us and in the in the public official themum. Nat would go and cover press conferences in city hall. Bernie had lots of them. There was a lot going on in the city and um those camera people were very hospitable to him and treated him as a member of the press corps. So it was a very exciting time. And then we um did a series called CCTV goes to Montpielar where we actually raised some grant money and spent a legislative session going down to the Montpielar every week and and creating a show a week on a different theme happening in the legislature. And then we would make duplicate the tapes and we would send them to all the existing public access channels. So at that point maybe there were eight or nine of them. So that's how tapes were being distributed was on VHS copies getting sent to places by mail. Just keep that in mind. And um in 1987, these nice guys who own Green Mountain Cable who said they would be our friends forever were given an offer they couldn't refuse. So they had bought put the deal together for 37 million and two years later they were offered 117 million by Adelfi Cable to sell the Vermont systems. And that's when we learned um that even if they didn't want to sell, they had to because they were made this offer and their investors required them to sell it. And that's why BC corps were started because the same thing happened to Ben and Jerry's where they were given an offer they couldn't refuse. But in a BC Corp, you can consider other factors, not just um the investor's financial return in making deals. You can figure other things into that so you can potentially refuse takeover deals. But I digress. Adelfia purchased the system and in that purchase they had to go back to the public service board to get approval. And at that point, we were producing so much programming. We were producing um at least two and a half hours every Friday night plus the alderman's meetings and plus the Wednesday night show and we went to all the local governments around and said do you want to h you want a government access channel because it's time to activate not just the public access channel which is set but the government access channel. So, we traveled around to all the surrounding communities and pretty much everyone got behind us except Essex said, "We don't want a Bernie channel." And we said, "You're going to have a Bernie channel unless you hop on board." So, they hopped on board and then Colchester wasn't really keen, but they came around. Actually, Colchester got a town of the year award because they at first they didn't want their meetings covered, but they changed their minds about it. So, that was good. So armed with these municipalities, we went back to the public service board, intervened, got party status, and made the case for the first government access channel. And that was channel 17, which is no longer channel 17, but it's what everyone often refers to it. And that became a trust that these municipalities hold. And they hired CCTV to run it. And that's why we run channel 17. Started September 13th, 1990. Even though in 1987 was when we first went, it took us another two court cases to um get the money, get Adelfia to pay us the money and get the public access channel people to understand that we wanted a people's government access channel. And we had to wrangle all that. But we did. By September 1990, we opened our new studios right here in the Old North End with $50,000 for equipment and $50,000 to operate. And that's when we started shows like live at 5:45. It was actually live at 5:45, not 525, which we did 15 minutes right before the news to tell everybody what was coming up. And then our most popular program was Stump the Chumps, which was a local history call-in show with her Bloom Blumenthal and Al Bernardina and a host of fabulous people. That was her most popular show ever, maybe even to this day. So in the meantime, the worldwide web had been invented by Tim Bernier Lee and that of course was a huge innovation in the um popularization of the internet, making it easy for people to move from um textbased menus. That's how you would choose things, textbased menus to what we use now, hypertext. And then in 1990, so not very long after video dial tone was invented and video dial tone essentially was the phone companies getting into the video business. Phone companies figuring out, oh, we can send a video signal on a telephone line. Okay, remember way back telephone broadcast, they had their own regulatory frameworks. Well, now think about broadcast signal getting sent on a telephone line. So, that's going to just throw everybody's regulatory thinking up into an upheaval, which it kind of did, and we're still arguing about it even now. But here's a great quote from Eli Gnome, who was a thinker at the time. Today we are in the midst of a celebrated convergence in which individualized media, telephone and mass media, cable are increasingly overlapping technologically. I mean it seems obvious now but that that was a big insight. And at the same time that all of these things were happening, we helped start LCA TV, Lake Champlain Access TV, which served Colchester, Milton, and Georgia. And then we spun that off as a nonprofit with Jess Wilson running it. And Jess Wilson came to work with CCTV a few years later. In 1993, we started a great project with um Peter Fra called Point Counterpoint where we would hold formal debates on the issues the legislature was considering in the Senate chambers. Peter would be the moderator. He would pick the people and we would bring our whole team and all our cameras, three cameras, and set it up and record it. And we didn't have a switcher. Switchers were unbelievably expensive. We didn't have a switcher. So, we would shoot three three versions of the same piece of the same event and then edit it as if it had been switched. Just saying. I mean, when Nat started, we didn't even have a video controller, so he would record from deck to deck. We were incredibly primitive. And then we Dan Higgins bought an editor and had that at his house. This was before we we opened the government access channel, channel 17. So, we were working out of our houses. So, Nat had the cameras. I had the copers. I was the propaganda queen. And Dan had the editor. And Nat and I would rent this editor for $5 an hour. And that's how we edited things. That was before we got our own studio. So, things were quite primitive, but we love that. I think you know the handmade titles all those things that we did to make television back in the analog era and another I think important piece of what happened during that time with and it always was important was policy and in 1991 um Richard Seville was a organizer who'd been hired I don't know by if it was electronic frontier foundation or epic I'm not sure who hired him but some donor gave that organization money to hire an organizer to come into Vermont to organize around public interest telecommunications. And Richard Civil was the guy and he called me up and we created this committee um which people from state government education uh kind of ad hoc people. It was an ad hoc committee. We talked about and we met about how we were going to make this transition from an analog government, let's say, and education to a digital reality. I got to say this state government really dragged their feet. Um they're they're finally kind of coming into their own, but it it it was very bulcanized. You could see how difficult it was going to be to break through all the walls of information and data that people had in order to create coherent databases and systems that were electronic. So interesting eye on that. Um we were hired by Governor Cunan to produce a video about the digital era and state government. I would like to see that again. Be really interesting. And then also, you know, coming into the 90s, the Cable TV Protection and Competition Act, which um prohibited the regulation of cable rates. And then you would see over time these these laws or these FCC rulings that started to um take the take regulations and loosen them up in the name of um promoting the internet and promoting broadband and making things easier for companies. So they had less requirements and less rules. So that public interest what was defined as the public interest or the public convenience and necessity started to transform it has taken different flavors during the time of the regulatory histories. We became very involved in this time with other organizations through Richard who were what I would say on the other side of the looking glass. These are organizations that were liberating computer technology at the same time that we were trying to liberate video technology. And as video and computers started to converge because again these were very separate enterprises. They weren't connected. They weren't yet connected. That video dial tone was a really important concept. So we the activists started to come together in a series of meetings and um those meetings culminated in two or three years hosted by the Apple Library of Tomorrow and under the rubric of community networking. These were hosted national conferences highlighting cutting edge examples of internet age access and these were like community internet projects in rural Colorado or um the cyber skills project in Bristol, England, which trained a whole generation of pe displaced workers who had worked in the tobacco industry and the shipping industry. retrain them to be able to be knowledge workers, internet-based workers. And that that model of cyber skills was extremely um informative to us and became the basis of a proposal we gave to the city who [clears throat] was applying Burlington was applying for an enterprise community grant with the feds. We wrote a one-pager up about how we would create this old northn community technology center to train low-income displaced workers in how to use the new technology. And we were granted $500,000 to do that. And we bought a storefront across the street and we started to train people in how to use AOL and word processing and the internet. AOL and other kinds of related projects which evolved over time between 1995 and probably 2005 into a series of youth training programs, nonprofit training programs and ultimately we spun our computer center off to the Fletcher Free Library. We closed the storefront and we were able to consolidate our video and computing um activities and education here under CCTV in this studio. And at the same time, we also had our own little production company called Northern Image Productions. It's called CCTV Productions today. We were very interested in the idea of the intersection of video and computing and it wasn't always clear about how to do that because the channel 17 enterprise was doing its own thing and the cyber skills the old north end community technology center which became cyber skills Vermont was very demanding project that um had a lot of financial success. We were able to attract a great deal of federal money and foundation money, but it was a very difficult project to manage because essentially it was a social service project, not a technology project. And I wasn't really that experienced in running a social service project and I spent a lot of time trying to kind of keep the organizations separate from each other because of just the requirements and the demands and really the difficulties of running cyber skills. So we never it wasn't that we never but it it was difficult to try and bridge the two because the cultures of these two projects within the same organization were very different. But we received a great deal of money from the Cerna Foundation who really felt um that there was something promising here. And I had first called the certain foundation right when Howard Dean was gaining in ascendancy and in his quest to run for president. And so that became interesting to this hearing this officer this grant officer Vince Staley. And so he stuck with us for many years and supported us to do different kinds of projects namely cyber skills but also this transition to streaming video. And in 1998, we put Governor Howard Dean's press conferences live stream for the first time. We were covering those. We had been hired to cover those press conferences and we streamed them live. I remember watching in my kitchen on the computer and thinking, "This is the most exciting moment of my life." I hadn't yet had my daughter, but um so 1998 was when we started this streaming um experiment. And then in 2000, we evolved cyber skills into a project that focused on nonprofits, not training um displaced workers, but focusing on nonprofit capacity and converging the video and it bringing internet skills to nonprofits through a series called we called the media mavens, which were these lunchons that we did once a month that were very well attended and a real great opportunity to educate people about what we were doing. And um we became involved with organizations like N10 which again were places where new technology for social good was people doing those kinds of projects from all over the world. We're getting together and we just learned so much from being part of this international network. In 2005 Adelfia Cable declared bankruptcy. That's it interesting story all in its own. the owners of Adelfi Cable, who were this Greek family, the Regus family, really um treated the company as their personal bank, even though it was publicly held. And so they got into trouble. They got a little overextended. They did um increase their subscriber base significantly. They consolidated many of the mom and pops in Vermont and became one big company in Vermont. And that big company, which by then was probably 80% of all the cable companies left in Vermont, became Adelfia. And then Adelfia across the country was split by Comcast and Time Warner. And that was a big big case. You know, by th by this time we were joining forces with the other access community access operations in Vermont in order to join our resources to be able to afford participating in a public service board docket because it was very expensive and very long. But we knew how to do it. And part of that working together is Vermont Access Network led to VMX, Vermont Media Exchange, which was a statewide is a statewide file sharing network, which allows us to not send VHS tapes by mail like we used to, but to have a file exchange, which allows this program, for example, to be seen in different parts of Vermont and even in the country. We were um very involved in thinking about national policy about how to ensure public access to all forms of telecommunications. So, not only to cable but to telecom, right, which was now running video over the wires. And we produced this handbook as part of the Alliance for Community Media, the People's Guide to the Telecommunications Act of 2006, part one and two. But it came pretty clear, it became pretty clear that um Congress wasn't going to do anything about this to make sure their public interest served when it came to telecommunications policy. The George Stony Award for humanistic communications was awarded to me, but really to CCTV. And we had a whole host of fantastic shows, long-running series that ran during this period. The housing and community show by Mike McNamera on the Waterfront, which I think Melinda Molton is still producing in a different form. Near and far, Richard Kemp, Peggy Lur's Feminist Media Review, Preservation Burlington, The Artful Word, um, which is a great show that covered the arts on a regular basis. The Vermont Worker Center produced a regular show Sandy Bar's commentary till until she passed. She did that positively Vermont nuclear free Vermont just many shows during that period which continue. There's so many great shows that was just a handful from that period. And Mark Lloyd who was a great thinker of that period said the communications policy debate is about the nature of democracy. who gets to speak and for what price and to whom. True words. And then of course there is the ongoing um debate launched by the brand X case which I like to say is the internet a floor wax or dessert topping meaning is it a title one um classified kind of technology or title two and a title one means that the internet is um like a closed garden. It's controlled by who owns it and that those people who own the internet service gets to decide who travels on it. And title two, which is more like the telephone network, used to be a common carrier that all traffic is treated equally. And you can see still to this day this argument about whether it should be controlled by the people who own it or it should be an open superighway for any content to travel on. has gone back and forth from FCC case to FCC. 2005, 2007, 2010, 2021. It just it isn't settled. It just depends who's in Congress and who controls the FCC. In 2008, we um were given the opportunity given our work with nonprofits to put in a proposal to the Vermont Community Foundation, who was looking for the next generation of the Vermont Association of Nonprofits, which had shut down because it wasn't profitable. And we said to the community foundation, listen, we're really good party planners so we can bring people together and we're really good um online networkers. So why don't you give us a chance to revive this statewide nonprofit network which they gave us $50,000 seems to be the magic number that we get. It's never enough to start anything, but we did. And we started Common Good Vermont, which is a nonprofit support project meant to connect people. We traveled around the state. We held the equivalent of media maven lunches and we created an online um hub of content for people to use and common good Vermont is still going strong 2026. It's very viable. It's got lots of members and it's run out of the United Ways of um Northwest Vermont and there are many people who worked on that project. Um Nick Carter and Sam Mayfield and Sheila and um and it just keeps going. It's fantastic. The one thing about CCTV is that we have always innovated. We've we are really an entrepreneurial organization because the question of how do you serve the public interest through media has got to the answer changes because the technology has changed and the media is changing and so for us to think that we're still in the cable TV business when we're not in the cable TV business only is to stand still. CCTV's always been an entrepreneurial organization. the idea of what public access means in a changing technological environment means it's got to change. And so we've always been awake to those possibilities and those changes and tried to think about innovative ways to to serve the public interest and build community and connect people and help people tell stories no matter what is the the tools are. And we've done this in order to demonstrate for policy makers what the policy solutions should be. That's why we started the old north end community technology center. It's why common good Vermont is an innovative example of how to connect people using the internet building on community. And then the civic cloud project was a really interesting project. It was a nightfounded foundation grant to demonstrate public and educational and civic uses of Burlington's gigabit network. Because one of the things that I didn't mention is that during this time, remember when Bernie got Cox Cable to pay us a million dollars not to be municipal cable? Well, we built a municipal cable and telephone service in Burlington called Burlington Telecom. And it's a fiberbased network, very innovative at the time, ran into some real issues about being run municipally. And so it ended up being bought um by a commercial company, but the gigabit capacity, this immense capacity was very inviting and the people that work there were very interested in collaborating. And we had um Andy Crawford working here at the time and some other real innovative people who thought, "Oh, let's create this tech course or like a center of servers and use it as a public access tech core like center physical center where people who are doing projects to serve the public interest whether it's you know games for schools or [clears throat] um storing ing video archives of community institutions, you know, any number of different things. We we had the bandwidth and we just needed enough servers to put this together and create a shared server and network used by CCTV, used by the media factory, which are the other two access channels, public access and educational access channel that was started, and then other community partners. So this Civic cloud was a great idea, but it was a little ahead of its time and we didn't have quite enough financing. And so we ended up folding that into the tech core. And that is kind of like the old North End Community Technology Center, Cyber Skills, folding itself into nonprofit projects that folded itself into Common Good Vermont. So all of these projects have laid the groundwork for the next thing that we're doing. And I think I mentioned here in 2019, Burlington Telecom is sold by the city to Shur Corporation for $30.8 million. Yes, just a PS. And then [clears throat] we there are a number of other innovations that have happened as a result of negotiating with Comcast, which is now the cable company. In 2015, we finally resolved that franchise renewal working all together with all the folks in Vermont Access Network and that resulted in a statewide channel called Vermont Community Television which now runs on the Comcast network. And I would just add up here that our work in media internships have been have grown over time significantly. We started this with like way back in the day. We would have one or two interns um people who have gone on into careers in in media, but you know, one or two at a time. Even Nat's kids worked with us in the in the 90s, but this media internship program have really um expanded under the leadership of Megan and Travis. And we really feel strongly and agree with Pat after Heidi who's a a scholar in our field that media literacy is a basic tool for citizenship in an information age. So now that we have full-time staff and we have these marvelous internship programs, that is a great great step up for us along with our commitment to the CCTV archives which you know now they're now number about 60,000 pieces of media and our programs and we have been steadily digitizing again this was a determination of Megan Aor who's now our executive director and Jordan Mitchell who's our head of archives to steadily with little bits of funding and then some bigger bits of funding from the NE to turn our analog assets our VHS tapes into digital assets files. We have about 3,000 left. It's quite a miracle and those archives are an immense immense treasure trove for the community and it's due to the fact of these effort of these people but also because Nat was so careful about cataloging and notetaking and numbering so that they can be found and cataloged. Incredible. So, here we are. 2020 had just kind of we just come out of it. our um 40th anniversary in 2024. But since that time, everyone has come out of their houses and we are still a going concern here at CCTV and it's run by Megan Oorc who's worked here since she was um a student. We have a, you know, we have this old story about Megan or I have this story which was when she was at UVM, she was part of the group of students that occupied the president's office and Nat went that was in the 80s I think and Nat um went to videotape it and again it was before the internet and so Nat videotaped this occupation from the outside and then somehow the students on the inside who were in the president's office got napped some tape from the inside what they were doing. The police were battering down the walls and the president was climbing up a ladder to get into his office. He didn't last long and um he Nat put this on on a Sunday. He edited it together. He aired it and by Monday when it was in the papers, everyone had already watched watched this video on on CCTV. And that next day, a whole bunch of the students, including Megan, came and we came to work and we found them sitting in the hallway outside of the office. And I think they were coming to see the video or get the video. I'm not exactly sure why they were there, but they're all sitting in the hallway. And I I Nat said to me, "Don't they know they could just take this TV channel over right now?" [laughter] So, I always like to tell that story because it took Megan, you know, another few years, but now she runs CCTV. So, see, there's a circle. Everything's a circle. And we're just so glad to be here for the community. And thanks for watching this little short long history of CCTV and Community TV in Vermont.