The recent renovation of Janesville’s 50-year-old city council chambers includes a new broadcast equipment installation for television coverage of meetings. The new chambers has six active cameras recording in High-Definition (HD) with the ability to overflow video displays into adjacent rooms. Government meetings are recorded and broadcast live on Charter Cable 994 and streamed through the city’s website.
City of Stoughton launches the Stoughton Sports Network on Charter Spectrum
Cable viewers in the Madison area are now able to watch a new community access channel called the Stoughton Sports Network on Spectrum Channel 980. Two years in development, this year the City of Stoughton allocated funding to purchase the equipment necessary to broadcast two channels. The channel had formerly been used as an educational access channel by the Stoughton Area School District.
Starting this month, sports will be broadcast live and replayed exclusively on SSN 980 with some sports also broadcast live on WSTO 981 if needed. SSN will also feature past year’s sports from deep within its archives. As part of the upgrade, WSTO TV and SSN are now also streamed online in full HD. Beginning in the 2019-20 school year, the upgrade will enable the city to cover sports live from two locations at once.
Sheboygan builds last fiber link to Charter Spectrum
Sheboygan continues to improve its technical infrastructure to provide residents with the highest quality signal from its community TV station, WSCS, as possible. In 2018 we upgraded our studio and cameras to High Definition (HD). The previous cameras were more than twenty years old and although they were still operational, the quality of the image suffered. Once we upgraded our field and studio cameras, we decided to address the transmission link to the cable provider. We have had conversations, over many years, both internally and with Charter Spectrum representatives, about delivering the local PEG channels via fiber optic cable and finally replacing the original outdated analog coax cable that was installed in 1981. When a few determined citizens articulated to the common council their concerns and frustrations with the signal quality of WSCS, the city decided to fund the project. Construction is scheduled to begin in early spring and is expected to be completed summer of 2019.
Now the city just needs to convince Charter Spectrum to carry the community’s access channel in HD, rather than SD, on its subscriber network – a tall order as Charter does not carry any Wisconsin PEG access channels in HD.
