Community Video Report (Summer 1973)

Summer 1973 Volume Qne, Number One You are holding in your hands the first issue of Community Video Report, a newsletter about the activities of the Washington Community Video Center and about community video activities in the metropolitan area and around the country. This is our first attempt to explain in print what we are doing here in Washington. Inside we have described the projects we have started, the videotapes we have made and the other activities we have done since our beginning last year. But before you begin jumping into all those specifics, we thought it would be important to try and explain the general goals we are working toward, the strategies we think make the most sense, and how we developed these conclusions. We are about Neighborhood Television ---the idea that local communities should have the means of using television, the most powerful communications tool ever devised, to express, define, develop and educate. This does not mean that any other sort of communications should stop. On the contrary, the whole country is suffering from a lack of real communication at all levels. But the concept of a very local, neighborhood based television medium is new. It exists in the minds of only a ‘ew, and in reality only in the experimental stages. Where did this idea come from, and why didn[t some: body think of it sooner? To some extent, the idea of community or neighborhood television is the result of new advances in technology. In the mid-sixties, the invention of half-inch portable videotape equipment brought the cost of producing a program for a fraction of the cost that regular TV studios had been paying. For the first time people could get the technological tocls that would enable them to make ‘‘homemade’”’ TV anywhere that they could carry the little 27-pound Japanese-made video machines. It! took the expansion of cable television into the big cities to really crystallize the concept of neighborhood television. Cable TV had been around since the late fort ies, functioning as a way of using wires and a master anten na to get far-away TV signals for viewers in rural areas who couldn't get a decent picture any other way. But in the late sixties the companies that owned these rural re-transmission systems were anxious to try wiring but to provide diversified programs, pay TV, data services for business, and a whole laundry list of potential ideas—-once the basic wires were laid. OPEN HOUSE TIME.....Members of the community watch a videotape about the Indian’s struggle in South Dakota which was shown at the WCVC’s open house, April 29. By 1972 the Federal Communications Commission finally lifted its ban of urban cable systems by passing rules which allow limited cable development in the larger cities and suburbs. These rules, among other things, required builders of these systems to provi le 20 channels, a limited two-way capacity on the wires, and three channels specifically dedicated to access by the general public, the educational community, and the local government. These access channels could provide the basis for a much more localized television system than we now have. For, as it stands today, most Americans watch TV over stations which send out their programs to miltions of people in a metropolitan area. This prevents very detailed discussion of issues that any one of the hundreds of communities watching the stations might wish to have. And these stations are controlled by those who own them, so continued on page 9 BES EE OE ERE ES INSIDE THIS ISSUE Community Monitors Government Survival Information Project Washington-aree videofcable groups WCVC tape log Broadcast access PPRDP Aanwn