Whether
you are sitting in a Paris hotel, a dorm room at the University of Georgia, or
in your office in San FranciscoÕs Financial District, you can now tune in to
Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Atherton community television
channels. If you want to see a
city council meeting or a high school football game, you can find community
cable TV channels 26 and 27 on the Internet. Add the word ÒwebcastÓ to your lexicon and the URLÕs listed
below to your ÒbookmarksÓ list.
The
Midpeninsula Community Media Center is one of the first community media centers
nationwide to webcast its channels on the internet, joining cities like
Manhattan, Brooklyn, Honolulu, Sacramento, and Cambridge, MA. The webcasts are made possible by a
Cable Co-op Legacy Grant and a local Internet company named Internet Systems
Consortium (ISC). Cable Co-op, the former
mid-peninsula cable television operator, made the grant from gains on the sale
of the system to AT&T Broadband, now Comcast, in 2000. The Media Center was just one of over
30 community organizations that received support from the Legacy Grant program.
ISC, a leader in open source software, is providing high availability Internet
services to the Media Center under its Hosted@ISC program. Hosted@ISC was specifically created to
foster growth and support the needs of open source applications and community
Internet projects by providing services at little to no cost to the
participant.
Channel
26, now webcast on the internet at <http://www.communitymediacenter.net/watch/videos/ch26_live.html>, carries local government meetings
including Palo Alto City Council, most Palo Alto Commission meetings, and Menlo
Park City Council meetings. East
Palo Alto City Council meetings are expected to come online in 2006.
Channel
27, on the internet at <http://www.communitymediacenter.net/watch/videos/ch27_live.html>, carries a wide range of programs produced by local
residents featuring local arts, issues, and entertainment.
Residents
and those who work in the Media CenterÕs service area can borrow video
production equipment or utilize the TV studio and edit suites for nominal
fees. The Media Center provides a
wide array of workshops in video production and more recently has added classes
for internet-oriented media production.
In the coming months the Media Center intends to archive a variety of
programs on its web site that will be available Òon-demandÓ at any time. At
this point, the Menlo Park City Council meetings are archived and indexed by
agenda item. They can be viewed at
<http://www.communitymediacenter.net/watch/menlo_webcast/menlo_ondemand.html>.
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