Sitting in front of a video camera and aided by a special keyboard which enabled him to communicate with his teacher in an experimental studio-classroom four miles away, Jeff Hubert watched his teacher on his home television while she, in turn, watched Jeff on her monitor in the studio. The experiment was the initial step in a plan by TeleCable Corporation of Norfolk, Virginia to develop interactive cable television to serve communities. A politician can propose a new idea and ask the viewers what they think of it. The people can push the Y button if they say yes or push the N button for no. If these people do not have the equipment or expertise to use this opportunity, the station will provide without charge studio space, at least one television camera and a director.
Cable TV can provide local information the way the newspaper gives local news.
But it can do more than the local paper. Cable Television can make it possible for your community organization to conduct a meeting of all the people in your neighborhood, without any of them having to leave their homes. Television can become far more flexible, far more democratic, far more diversified in content, and far more responsive to the full range of pressing needs in today's cities, neighborhoods, towns, and communities. For the first time there is an obligation to involve both individual private citizens of the most humble stature and community communications committees in planning the design and future control of an all-pervasive and revolutionary fact of city life. There is now an obligation on the part of the major city governments of Canada and the United States to maintain and invite a defined share of access for individuals and citizens' groups to the proliferating channels of cabled communication in the city.