Great News! Both Rice Lake Community Media and Oshkosh Media are back on Charter Spectrum Cable after a more than two week outage. According to James Wyngaard, Director of Rice Lake Media, Charter Spectrum was able to find a used part for the Rice Lake encoder and Jake Timm, Operations Manager of Oshkosh Media, said the company located a used encoder that enabled both of its channels to go back up this afternoon.
WCM is still hoping to see Green Bay’s Fox Valley channel and its city channel back on the line-up soon under new management. The City of De Pere is willing to take over the Green Bay City Channel, which means residents of Green Bay will be seeing De Pere’s city channel that will carry the Green Bay City Council meeting. Oshkosh Media will manage the Fox Valley Channel.
Wisconsin Community Media is working on legislation to address outages and HD carriage. “WCM is worried about the aging equipment Charter Spectrum has in place in PEG stations across the state. Which PEG station will go down next? Wisconsin needs better enforcement tools and it needs to require video service providers to truly serve their communities by carrying PEG channels in HD. SD is last century technology.”
According to the statute (66.0420), the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) has rulemaking and enforcement power over nearly all of the law governing video service providers, but according to DFI, it never takes any enforcement action because the statute was written without any enforcement tools (except an extreme remedy, taking a company to court). Because it lacks enforcement tools, DFI does not accept complaints either. DFI refers all complaints to the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP), which has an online complaint form.
While DATCP cannot enforce the main statute, there is another statute (100.209) that is designed to protect subscribers. Under this statute, DATCP can order rebates to subscribers and institute penalties against video service providers. WCM does not know if it has exercised these powers.
