Members of the Monona Grove AV Club give the thumbs up to the “cool upgrades” at Monona Community Media.
The City of Monona’s Community Media Department has been working on some “cool upgrades” this year!
In early March, Daniell Krawczyk and his team from Municipal Captioning installed a new Cablecast VIO 2 OMNI playback video server that has smart phone mobile app capabilities. The new Monona Community Media mobile app will look and work much like YouTube, but without all the clutter of YouTube. “The app will make it so much easier for people to watch Monona programming anywhere, anytime,” said Will Nimmow, Director of Monona Community Media.
Because of this new equipment, Monona Community Media can now offer its TDS cable channel – channel 26 -- in HD (and Charter Spectrum could, too, if the company was interested). “In what I suppose is typical for a partnership between a cable provider and municipality, the process has been moving slowly,” said Nimmow, “but TDS has installed their equipment and cabling and the next step is working with them to get the encoder ordered and connected to the system.
Staff at Monona Community Media and the many students involved through the Monona Grove AV Club are practicing patience as they excitedly await the next steps. But as he waits, Nimmow hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs. He’s been planning the roll out of a strong promotional blitz with the Monona Community Media Committee. “We want all Monona residents to know how easily they can be connected to Monona Community Media radio and video programming.”
Even though this upgrade project was expensive, the city decided it was a necessary step to keep up with the communication needs of its residents. For the first time ever, the Monona City Council approved a capital purchase for the station as part of its 2023 capital expense budget. Normally such a purchase would have been paid with revenue from Video Service Provider fees, but revenue from these fees has been declining as the number of people subscribing to cable television declines.
Nimmow is very proud of the Monona City Council for taking such supportive stance, especially during such a challenging time for the city budget. "It seems they truly value what we do, so now the pressure is on us to continue our service level," he said.
