Franchise Agreements

Cable TV Franchise Woes, part four

Clickford, Steven M.

So the story ended with me in October in regards to the Cable TV Franchise Agreement. The ball was in the Town of Merrimack’s court (or should I say the 7 member board?)

I had some change in my personal life which while I did monitor emails, several instances occurred between early October to Mid November.

And why should I need to follow up? Comcast’s appointed rep of municipalities and the Merrimack Town Council should’ve been crafting a final agreement. It shouldn’t be taking this amount of time. While ten years ago the technology and consumer tastes were different, if someone who has worked in this field for over a decade, they should know the ins and outs of the processes, and if they don’t they should turn to the New Hampshire Collation for Community Media for help.

This also was the first meeting that was recorded in HD since the cablecast is still in SD, but still heavily compressed.

While the discussion of eliminating the requirement of cable systems providing franchise fees, the overall sentiment was the town is dragging it’s feet. While the department head had said they received memos from 3 residents, it’s unsure if those individuals were notified about feedback or being in part of the Ad-Hoc committee for the Cable TV Franchise Agreement and also exploring the unregulated Internet franchising, and possibly improving the apparently deficient Merrimack TV operation. There has been no communication received by me from them as of this writing.

While my cable TV services that my family pays won’t be impacted per se, it’s not  good on leadership of our town government to stall negotiations with Comcast while it was known to me that it would be by this point the Town Council (of which is the government of Merrimack, NH again) would’ve had no more discussions and a contract would’ve been in place by the time January rolls along.

Our leaders are so insistent that “the consumer” will benefit from having “more choices”. While the resident in the red shirt said in the UK there is handful of long haul ISPs, and the consumers have more than a dozen “last mile” ISPs, England is different from New England. UK with the Brexit factor is a country of their own, and New Hampshire legally is not. It’s very apparent that locals here believe they live in a state of their own mind, a republic, a rebellious against the outsiders.  But the harsh reality is New Hampshire is a state in the U.S.A. and we have to conform to Federal regulations. The Internet was granted no-touch approach from the early 1990s with the idea the public Internet would just only be electronic libraries and in the mid 90s out of plain magic, the electronic libraries were sold off to become malls, a community center, and other profitable places that thankfully no real library had to deal with. And since the government treated the Internet as an “information system” this is the end result.

People forget IP is just a driver for machines talking to machines, that the “Internet” is well known by public opinion for humans to talk to one another on the World Wide Web, and that most “clouds” use the Internet port 80 that used to be a commonly used ports to access “web pages” that once was accessed by Netscape. If that was too much, in plain English, the “Internet” is this magical, non mythical world that can work without any problems that the “consumer” will benefit.

Good luck to that. I don’t think other ISPs want to come to New Hampshire. And misusing funds for Cable TV to wire up the town with fiber for IP based services will have the hurdles of fake NIMBY complaints similar to the Tennessee Pipeline Company (or Kinder Morgan) had to go through by the same town 3 years ago.

This is one heluvla story that has shown the failures of democracy, the lack of the constituents’    interest, their lack of awareness of their own town government and the town government’s negligence to be fit to handle a contract that is becoming more technical legally than it should begin with.

The story is not over yet.

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Cable TV Franchise Woes, part three

Clickford, Steven M.

In early October, the following was submitted to the Town of Merrimack’s Media Services unit with the intention that this memo would become some form of public information, pursuant to RSA 91a, the Right to Know Law.

For the exercise of privacy, the address is withheld for this post.  The memo outlines things that would benefit the intelligence of the consumer, and should’ve got people in the position of power to question Comcast. Read on

Continue reading →

Cable TV Franchise Woes, part two

Clickford, Steven M.

Given the anger from the previous two meetings, one would’ve logically thought at least five angry men would come up and whine and bitch against Comcast. In fact no one came and spoke their minds!

…Except for one gentleman from another part of town who is apparently self employed and is “enthusiastic  in telecom” to only find his LinkedIn account at the time, the only “telecom” reference professionally was telephony at the help desk level. He said publicly he’s a “systems engineer that works at home” full time. This individual who identified himself as “consumer”  stood his ground that the cable TV franchise system was so broken he called the franchise fees  “a tax” not only that but pissed on the quality of the PEG programming. While it may be true, he  compared the PEG channels  to a mid 2000s TV series being shot on filmy DSLR. I thought the Betacam, SVHS and all the digital tape stuff was supposed to destroy the medium that made media fake in my opinion. (Conjecture at best on this topic…  Broadcast video grade at 60fps is the only medium I’ll support :))

He even suggested the programming should be reduced to a single channel for the “technically inclined” viewers. A bit snubby at best. He spoke and gave “ideas” (i.e. non-concrete, risky and not proven outcomes, and providing suggestions with very little knowledge on the subject.) He gave a bunch of talking points supporting his argument, and even had the audacity to attempt to make a followup comment after the hearing concluded!

Your’s truly came up next.

I am going to not talk about myself but relay what I learned in those questions that if I didn’t come up, the public would be left in the dark of the black smoke known as Democracy in Doubt.

  • The Town Council is the Franchising Authority of the Cable TV Franchise Agreement
  • Because the Town Council is the government of the Town of Merrimack, N.H. (noticed how I got lost?)
  • How the hell that 7 elected members can be a government and it’s legality – the video can speak for itself.
  • The Town Manager’s employer is the Merrimack Town Council. How does that look on a resume?
  • The Town of Merrimack’s executive management was apparently unaware that could serve as a mediator after consumers would contact Comcast prior. This has been an S.O.P. for years in other towns!
  • Accounts receivable to Merrimack meant Comcast had gave back money because of some interest involved.
  • I defended the Public Access, but not only that requested that it should be fully funded at the 5% max and suggested if they invested in themselves, the quality of content would improve, since social media is leading to Too Big to Fail Culture and now content creators must pay to play to get seen especially in the civilian content such as Facebook and YouTube (the meeting minutes erroneously stated Hulu which I didn’t say, as that platform doesn’t allow freelancers or independents a platform.)

The handouts also had some bad spelling referring to Harron Communications, spelled in the form of the big bird (Heron instead). I hate to be so obsessed about minor details, but if they don’t catch spelling errors, then what else is going in at the Town Hall?

At this point, the Town Council closed the public hearing. However, letters and emails could still be received by October 10th. The following day, the public notice on the town’s website disappeared, leaving a vague signal if missed the chance to speak even further?

It went through.

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