By Derek Westby, Senior Network Administrator, City of Stoughton
In March of this year a Stoughton WSTO TV staffer walked into the studio and was alarmed to see that the decades-old analog modulator had stopped working. For those of you not familiar with how local PEG (public education, and government) programming gets onto a video service provider’s cable system, just know that if this equipment breaks, the local PEG channel is off the air. For those of you who manage PEG media centers, you well know this was catastrophically bad news because these extremely antiquated devices are the only way we can provide a signal to Charter Spectrum (Charter). And you can’t buy them anymore.
Just how obsolete are these modulators? Consider this. WSTO uses a full HD digital broadcast server to store and output the programming it produces. In order to be compatible with Charter’s method of carrying the PEG channel, however, the City of Stoughton had to purchase a server with a special output that reduces the quality of the video signal by converting the digital HD signal to an analog SD signal acceptable to the antiquated analog modulator that was discontinued at least decade ago but Charter insists we must continue to use.
On that scary day, once the WSTO staffer noticed that the signal was no longer outputting from the modulator it was all hands on deck. We began a search of our shelves to find the city’s final backup modulator to get the channel back on the air. Within a short time we had found it, connected it up and we were back on the air!
The City of Stoughton was lucky to have had a spare. It had once been needed to go live from another city building, but with digital upgrades completed by the city several years back, it was no longer needed. A digital network is in place that uses higher quality RTMP streaming to carry the signal back to the WSTO studio.
So although this was a short-lived outage, it could have ended disastrously. If either of the modulators for the City of Stoughton’s two PEG channels go off the air again, we do not have another spare and we can’t purchase one because this product is no longer sold.
WSTO started working with Charter to identify how to upgrade the equipment to modern encoders similar to what TDS is already using to carry PEG channels in HD and the company quoted me a price of just over $10,000. I did some comparison shopping and found that another brand with the same specifications could be purchased for just over $4,000. But Charter does not want to use that brand.
But the price of the new equipment is not the only stumbling block. Several cities have been waiting well over a year for Charter to install the equipment they have agreed to purchase and Charter keeps pushing delivery back.
This spring the reason became clear when one media center was told by Charter that if it wanted its programs carried in HD, it would need to pay for transmission and quoted the city $780 per month or nearly $10,000 per year. Never mind that state law requires video service providers to transmit PEG programming at no cost to cities. But apparently Charter is only willing to do that if cities continue using obsolete analog modulators that will soon break, forcing PEG channels off its systems.
