When there is so much to be concerned about, we go through the motions we knew to be appropriate before this precursor to a Golden Age. (satire)
March 12, 2025 HB5837 Testimony Submitted to Appropriations. There is no hearing scheduled on this matter. The Legislature has much on its plate.
Absent a Legislative Solution HB 5848, 5837 Community Media Bridge Funding
An active 7-day-a-week, 24/7 public digital media organization needs a minimum of 1.75 FTEs to provide services the community considers a ‘reasonable need’. Therefore, base staff costs with skill-level dependencies are $100,000 annually. This assumes a minimum of 12 hours of studio production time a week. This is bare bones; not competitive wages, benefits, training to stay current, or 9-5 hours. If a nonprofit station has less revenue, it cannot provide minimal services without relying on volunteers, grants, contracts, or municipal underwriting.
A decade ago, cable TV was in its stride. At that time our small town-specific community media station received $93,000 in cable revenue. Another approximately $22,000 went to neighboring towns (pass-through fees from Wallingford residents). Our anticipated cable fee revenue in 2025 is $58,000.
Even with all of Wallingford’s fees staying in Wallingford, revenue alone would not have been enough to thrive. To keep the doors open and invest incrementally in a permanent home, I have volunteered full-time since 2011. Wallingford is an outlier. It is also proof that a bare-bones investment can empower a community. I tell my community media story here.
Current State
With a new generation choosing not to subscribe, and cable TV subscription costs becoming prohibitive for many households, community media revenue is declining exponentially.
The current revenue model is restricted by statute. A 2022 PURA study confirmed any change in funding, or the provision of the public benefit, requires statutory change. A bill drafted by the Consumer Counsel with support from PURA failed in the last session. Heavily lobbied with a veto threat by former cable guy, the governor, leaves community media in limbo.
Backstory
Community TV was to be a public benefit. The benefit was local government, schools, and ordinary people would have access to resources for media creation and distribution. For the use of rights-of-way, cable companies were to cover the cost of this benefit. However, the 1960 lobbyists argued that the ‘new’ industry should only pay based on the number of hookups. This led to cable viewers paying for the benefit instead of the companies. Decades later, the now Fortune 100 and 500 companies use the same polls for several different business models BUT the only revenue used for public benefit is cable TV subscriptions.
Bridge to …
HB 5848, and 5837 were drafted for the 2025 session to allocate supplemental funding to keep nonprofit providers of community media afloat in locations where millions of dollars in capital investments have been made in the past decade.
How Much and for How Long
It is strongly recommended that this bridge allocation underwrites a need assessment* styled after the franchise renewal process of 1960-1995. Need assessments enabled communities to weigh in on the media needs of their communities and what should be provided in exchange for physical access to consumers and transfer capabilities. This would include the channel capacity question.
Cable TV companies have morphed into something ‘other than cable TV’. However, the results are the same: Content is viewed on screens. An infrastructure that has similar dependencies on rights of way.
At the moment, crafting the right balance for true accessibility within a stable funding framework is no one’s responsibility. We face an erosion of this public benefit at a time when ‘media’ is ubiquitous, in a constant state of transition, and unreliable. At a time when it is important to do more, we can barely do what we have been doing.
The question “How small or big (geography and population)?” is appropriate for community media. However, absent an assessment process, the current statutory legacy language mixed with a heavily lobbied push that community media is no longer relevant yields one thing: less community engagement, youth training opportunities, and an underutilized investment in technology across CT.
I encourage a simple approach to funding with the assumption that it will take at least 18 months to determine a ‘future state’. Provide all public access community media centers with the same baseline investment and see where that investment leads concurrently with a need analysis.
Thank you for considering how community media can provide resources in this time of uncertainty.
*A need assessment would include a comprehensive review of proprietary data. Enrollment in Basic Cable. Senior Discounts. Areas where the Internet is not robust. Geographic limitations in the infrastructure and the laws. Questions such as, ‘If an organization streams content on YouTube and Facebook is there value in supplying the content to a local channel especially if the ability to experience the content is delayed?’
For 20 years, WPAA-TV has scheduled local churches on the Same Day as the services. During Covid, we extended this service to more communities. They continue to share content with us. Why? Because a few members, assumed to be elderly, prefer watching TV over the internet or on their phones. Is this a reasonable community need? Can it be quantified? Are there more affordable alternatives for this diminishing population? Many other community TV stations are still not providing same-day content. Is this a reasonable need?