there are now about two thousand cities where local cable systems offer training equipment and channel time for people to make and distribute their own t v programs it's dedicated to free speech schools libraries basements and storefronts access studios have been cropping up for almost twenty years this is a station about real people doing condition for the sake of the living a place to speak out on the aids crisis it's a prime time electronic soapbox for media criticism and commentary in new york city access is a bargain that's hard to beat it's usually paid for by a small percentage of subscriber fees or out of license fees paid to a city by a cable company with more than half the country wired for cable t v the majority of americans can now view or use these channels welcome to austin texas well we've got about i would say easily about seventy five tapes here about three days with the program and this time of the week it's friday take takes back home play back then we take them out we're really got  v austin community television it's one of the oldest and most prolific access centers in the country that's got a staff of seventeen helps direct traffic as hundreds of community group artists musicians and other austin residents make their own t v program famine days came st in this case days when we were getting by on a shoestring unless there been times when or when we were driving the tapes up to the head into the system and doing live shows th y there's been a lot of opposition to the possible application of solar and wind energy resources to the city for ac t v lately it all started on a mountaintop in one thousand nine hundred and seventy three in circumstances it was a time when the family of lyndon johnson on the only t v station in town as well as half the cable system were trying to earn money for our own equipment and in so doing we're going to sponsor  in those days nobody wanted to  and then with the incoming franchise with cablevision there was a lot of like five hundred thousand dollars of your own operating money plus equipment and at that point everybody wanted the public access when a new cable company took over the system in one thousand nine hundred and one it was a new day for access out of a fifty two dollars channel system austin uses not just one but three public access channels with five additional access channels shared by schools and city government when i started in one thousand nine hundred and two i was scheduling about twenty one hours of public access shows every week on one channel and now they have three public access channels with approximately one hundred and seventy hours every week and viewership is also rising in one survey almost half of austin's cable subscribers said they watch access on a regular basis and i know about or at least fourteen or fifteen produced a religious service people watch children will sit in front of the television so people turn on the television before they pick up a newspaper before they read a book before they do a lot of things so t v if you want if you have a message to get out to the public joining export slick commercial t v programs for world consumption there are unique services of cable t v and within the cable t v industry they have lived a precarious life for almost twenty years they are their existence to people ideas and technological developments that go back more than forty years the development of cable t v in the late one thousand nine hundred and forty s was one key ingredient i some accounts it was all started by an unlikely group of revolutionaries living near the coal mining hills in lands for and pennsylvania mountaintop already had color vision they were receiving three philadelphia channels quite well if there was a good baseball game good sporting event or anything good on television plastered would just kind of  have p v on pop of us i guess the stuff just goes over our head and keeps going what brought cable television anchor valley was was a concern especially in lands forward of owners the man who owned the bar next to my house a polish immigrant with a just a terrific business mind cashmere it was his name cashmere  began to wonder about this because business was off and he wanted to do something about it so he and his son wondered if they put an antenna up on the mountain top a one thousand feet behind their wonderful reception was fair to pour it for the money they got in touch with some people around the valley who had a very good knowledge of radio and i think maybe signed some crude boosters to never seen before right was not unusual to see men who put their life on the line every day in the mines sit there and just watch how do you do it and buffalo bob smith not because they like watching kid stuff but because they were really looking to television they felt they were part of history being made towns live coverage of local events was plugged directly into the system as cable began to explore new ways of attracting subscriber and sixty s broad visions of a wired nation many experts today are speculating on how the daily activities of living in a wired home wired nation will someday be affected w if the family is watched over by a battery of biological sensors which communicate ok able to the head and computer the coaxial cable would carry the promise of almost unlimited channel capacity but federal restrictions and high costs would delay cables entry into most large and medium sized cit and sixty seven marked the arrival of a relatively affordable easy to use battery operated nightly black and white video porta pak it was intended primarily for home use good evening my fellow americans tonight i want to speak to you of peace in vietnam and southeast asia president lyndon johnson owned one of the st port of pax to arrive in the country a gift from the japanese government he used it to rehearse a speech restraint on the part of annoyed now that's what i want cut out here jane restraint on the part of the now i could of course be an important factor in our decision if for no restrain we will reciprocate or something like that this is a state the bombing language that makes sense what is called the about this war it was a speech that marked the beginning of the end of the vietnam war era if our restraint is matched by restraint in her knowledge and it had a surprise ending i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president the most powerful medium of communication ever invented was now available to just about anyone a video revolution was underway throughout south vietnam the day men still died in combat all across the country a video movement was being born and anti war protesters were beginning to talk back to their t v sets using  and cable t v was a potential means of distribution out of this time all these things going on was the awareness that one of the things that anybody who wants to try to effect social change is going to have to focus on is how do you get information out to people out of they talk to each other and you do that through the mass media the community is going to get off their ass experiment using the new video technology as a catalyst for social change people taking charge of their own lives was one of the battle cries of the late sixty's so it was certainly not something that that this was going to be a way of democratizing the media they learned the hard way of the difficult it was a government sponsored program designed to help poor people organize and bridge the communication gap between the bureaucracy and the people at all times the interview was played back on the spot and the person interviewed could ask to have his tape or raced if he did not like it in most cases this control gave people confidence and they were pleased to see how easily and well they had expressed themselves when george stoney returned to new york city the philosophy of challenge for change would go with  new york would be the st big city in the country to get cable t and while franchise negotiations were underway a movement to include channels that would serve community this was gr this was where cable t v the part of town and people with a fresh idea called public access all came together until the arrival of cable in the late one thousand nine hundred and sixty s tall buildings block good reception and new york city was a t v ghost town a series of meetings that were being held in new york about cable convincing the cable company to give up control of some spare channels was something that had never been tried before chairman of the largest cable system in the country he was out to win the new york city cable franchise and somehow he would have to be convinced to give public access a try this is  that most of them even know what it was and they didn't have it so it was very hard to make it real video access catalogue for the prototype the st half hour that i had to get together with intense interest by video groups as well as support from keith city officials the cable company was willing to listen we were the largest cable system at that point in the country we wanted to merge with the nd or rd largest and the two together would be bigger than the next five put together and got learned about a new word called anti trust in the department of justice where they would have to clear the deal the growth of teleprompter would be blocked unless irving kahn could convince the justice department that the proposed merger would serve the public interest in a new way we thought about it for quite a while and came up with the idea of public access and public access was where we could uniquely take advantage of our differences from broadcasting we were narrow casting not broadcast time is right to do this cable systems need new sources of programming with an uncanny stroke of luck a dream of making t v a more democratic medium seemed to dovetail with the dream of expanding the cable empire of teleprompter so i have to tell you no candor it wasn't for  or do gooder reasons but once we started the public access we began to see many possibilities idea that you could indeed open up television to the people that was just unheard of the following short excerpts of the programs produced reactions channels in new york with the assistance of open channel so a lot of our work really was educating getting people to understand that this was available to them and so when we reached out we reached out to a cross section of the community everything from the boy scouts of america to parade in support would be the st uncensored channels in the history of television was coming up with rules to regulate the cable industry in general historically they'd been very anti cable and so this new set of rules was coming up and they they thought would be kind of a nice if i would vote with the majority on this and i held out for the notion of public access channels as a requirement for cable systems kind of as exchange for my vote for the rest of it which i didn't have that much enth m for the wow that's really freaky you know i really like this i think there were some in the cable television industry who may have seen this is a way of getting more subscribers they have something else to sell i suspect there were some of the f c c and in the broadcasting industry who saw this is one more burden delay on the cable industry in the hopes they could keep it from ever going anywhere and and gr going to be additional expense take channels from them and so forth some probably saw it as just a good american thing to do and i suspect there are a lot of folks who just didn't pay cable much mind back then i mean cable didn't have much to sell there weren't very many required access channels and most cable systems in the country while they did have loopholes they were on the books and that was another milestone for access we were training people literally off the street you know come in and learn how to use this and make your own television and we then evolved into setting up workshops around the country in conjunction with cable system the alternate media center established an internship training program which prepared energetic recruits to run the workshops i knew that i wanted to build a sense of camaraderie among these people they came from all parts of the country one of my major goals for the workshop is corp between groups my major goal is the processes not the product the people behind the cameras are the people who produce the programming you're going to see tonight are all volunteers and what we were doing was very much parallel to what a whole access center does today except we were we were so the johnny appleseed so we're going out there with the equipment and seven communities around the united states and in doing this is one person within a work environment there were no professionals around it was the people and the media and since we are pioneering in our cable t v we must have you want to take that would you like to say hello to the people we were convinced that it would work that this would dedicated to community expression and promoting social change the alternate media center established one of the st interactive cable systems in the country so you know knowing you i thought you with funding from the markle foundation and the cooperation of cable systems the alternate media center help spawn a national network access centers out of its internship training program came fighters for the cause and founding members of a national federation which continues the access crusade schedule an appointment to talk about doing public access and when i mentioned on the phone public access he went and i was like pulling a trigger this man exploded and said no i've done public access i'll never do it again i want to talk to you and he hung up and exciting and it was different in that it was challenging the established media in a way that was going to be an uphill battle breaking down in albuquerque right but we started driving around looking at empty buildings and we found one have a metal empty metal building and in which we had to build roads petitions in a studio and that took the better part of two years to get that completely finished done with all volunteer help what was an empty metal shell is now the home of quote unquote you on starting an access center meant using your wits to make ends meet and working very hard to convince reluctant cable companies skeptical politicians and next door neighbors to support and use the access channels funding of public access for quote unquote particularly has changed dramatically in the eight years since we started from absolutely no funding at all to a quarter one million dollars annual operating budget actually on the program we have a beautiful young lady who has come to speak to us about her ideas to the thing that has stayed the same through all of that is the idea that public access is something that gives people the opportunity to realize the st amendment rights that is what has kept me working with public access as ready we also as i'm doing productions like friday night albuquerque mazie  always looking for people once you become a member of media associates you're allowed to use any of the equipment in the facility any of the facilities your editing studio what no charge as long as you're producing programming for the channel i brought from indiana with us so it's been kind of a place to come to cannibalize these things to get pieces to make something else work we never would have gotten po'd unquote nice human being who work this could be put together and you could have a television station from the fift good afternoon it's monday and once again it's time for tell it tracks this is new mexico's only call and request music video program phone numbers on the wall already unexpected outcomes of our workshop training was that somewhere around twenty people have gone through a workshop done a few production has taken their sample real to the local commercial station and got to work in the commercial television it's kind of strange because i'm in our case it was exactly the reverse i started out in commercial television and was fortunate enough to find and public access which is much more rewarding to me than in commercial  and seventy s started out as slow growth years for cable but federal rules that had kept cable out of most large and medium sized cities began to change and with the rising tide of new program services starting with home box office in and seventy five coupled with a new satellite delivery system cable had more to sell than just improved reception and was ready to make its move into the big city turf a broadcasters  seventy s were over america's cable wars would be underway and the access channels would have an important role to play well following these nine hundred and seventy two rules including the requirement for public access channels there was a legal challenge and there's been question all along about how much cable regulation the commission could do without it having any provision for congress with regard to this and finally in one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine the supreme court  decided that the f c c had gone too far at that time everybody said it was going to be the death knell of access it was access was all going to go away but by that time we were right in the beginning of the big cable franchising wars long term exclusive contracts meant high stakes and stiff competition the access channels became a bargaining chip and in many cases the ingredient which set one proposal apart from another the cour decided that the f c c could not require this but it did not address the question of whether a cable company in a local community in negotiating the terms of a contract called the franchise whether the cable company could agree to do it to get franchise was a real i mean it was the it was the big gold nugget hanging at the end of the string the number of channels the number of studios equipment staffing and the level of funding were all d it was media giants like westinghouse warner amex and time inc that were doing the bidding in french you put together what you thought sounded better than the next we have the community and i'm not having service it's really doggone shame when it happens with cable because we have seen it with all of the partial media backing out of contracts and looking for loopholes usually meant severe cutbacks county in spite of wide scale cutbacks access had achieved a national foothold but the specter of contract modifications continues to haunt many access centers today austin community television has become a model for the country it's a grassroots communication resource that serves diverse local needs but before the nine hundred and eighty s were over a c t v like access in many other cities would face one survival test after another in some cities the dream of having an open channel would be interrupted by a nightmare community cable television who should have access to it and who should not videotaped on a campus in southern california and when students on campus found out they to be it is something that in the past has been promoted to be high in the wary eye of society well racism will apparently become a weekly staple on the community cable t v station in pocatello idaho tomorrow night race and reason has left communities deeply divided as it appears on local cable systems across the country it's a half hour talk show hosted by tom metzger a former grand dragon of the ku klux klan the program has raised fundamental questions about free speech protection except for obscenity libel and incitement to imminent violence the black and the jewish community both that felt like it was an appropriate to have it on and then they took their complaints to the cable commission and all the stocks by the way you know were actively involved with public access so they could actually use the channels to put out their message for i think are perfectly and it is perfectly appropriate for them to do so i even think it's appropriate for them to call out for  the curtailment of his right to speak because that also is right of opinion i happen to think it is a wrong opinion and i don't think that their actions however should be carried out because the st amendment is one of those things that and nobody want that you know by this freedom of speech mess where we don't want us ok but we also know freedom of speech is not absolute we also know that the ku klux klan have a history of violence mecir were he to be empowered would repress freedom of thought freedom of expression that if we're going to be a free society then we must allow all points of view each of us has the option to turn off the television and not watch that horrible program we have that option that's our privilege in fact right now by by creating large visibility and a number of statements meskins getting a lot of free advertising he would normally never get to or you sitting down we should not protest because you know i didn't say that it's an ironic fact of the matter we do have another caller on line one and go ahead you  here and pocatello idaho the response was live interactive counterprogram great dissenting opinion is not going to hurt as long as there's an organized  educated response to the fallacies which they're using other options and then federal law or give the cable company your channels back i asked the office of general counsel of the california state university to advise me of our legal options within the context of the st amendment coincidentally because of equipment repair and maintenance requirements no further tapings are schedule i asked my staff to look into arranging with group w for them to film future public access programs in one of the other x turn all locations available to them acquire and become ver cable so you can use this to do some education ok in fullerton the cable company agreed to relocate the access studio metzger's program continued to be made elsewhere in austin grayson reasoned forced everyone to take a hard look at how the channels were being used and it made many people all the more determined to keep them industry as a whole was booming and channel space was becoming more and more valuable so i think it has just what i consider to be tremendous growth opportunities from the cash flow line and this is really a business which  managed to maximize cash flow and cash flow growth and the boom was helped in part by the one thousand nine hundred and eighty four cable act passed by congress which gave the industry great deregulation while cities lost the power to regulate cable rates the cable act did uphold their right to make access channels a requirement so in terms of the local programming in the community programming that that we have available on the cable system the access channels are pretty much it develop as fully as we all expected as one of the reasons we organise changes have been requested while most of the industry was prospering austin cablevision announced to the city it was facing financial loss unfortunately part of the rhetoric over the past few months has included such untrue assertions as austin cablevision wants to do away with access television i suspect that that's what's brought many people to this hearing tonight and in truth  they come for no reason we do not propose i want to order out there and they are proposing to cut back from eight fully programmed access trails that we have now back to for access channels they're proposing to eliminate funding operational support for funding access they're proposing to get rid of all of the equipment that is approximately half a one million dollars worth of equipment that is required in the franchise and to get rid of the requirement for an access studio a c t v survived famine and controversy it would now be facing an even bigger challenge the lawyers and accountants of the cable company a lengthy series of public hearings would consider the fate of t v cablevision has been sending millions of dollars from local subscribers to its parent company a t c in denver last year a reported record profits cablevision's allegedly poor financial showing is due primarily to accounting method methods which misrepresents the company's rate of return i hope that you will vote against franchise modification and against cablevision's oliver north style bookkeeping methods i also urge you to begin enforcing the city's contract with cablevision i'm not aware of any promises that were made that haven't been delivered upon when they have had some commercial or practical feasibility there were provisions that were were forced into contracts by cities and their consultants and their feeling was we've got a contract with you guys and if you don't perform on that you're wrong and we said you know that's not really helpful to the viewer and the citizen and the taxpayer because if we're doing a lot of things that are purely wasting money because someone once had a pipe dream that it would work that that money ends up coming back as part of our pricing base and the consumer has to pay more for cable television and us than if that happens that's not worthwhile we're going to try to do a certain number of pipe dreams that we don't believe in much but but which have a chance we're not willing to do things that are no chance and so that's really that's that's really where the austin situation as we s and what we see on public access you'll see programs you can't sell ads around you'll see high school football you'll see instructional programs for spanish speakers to learn english you'll see senior citizens exercise programs and you'll see programs by groups like the capital area food bank and the black citizens task force which had three members or earlier and they had a seven o'clock meeting and couldn't stay you couldn't sell ads around those programs and those groups couldn't afford to make those programs but they can participate because it's public access television commercial which we have to fight and i think we simply have to establish the principle that there is some space somewhere in these rivers of channels of communication throughout our societies that the public does have access to from which they cannot be excluded because the owner doesn't like what they're saying we had a big community celebration at a day of showing off