HomeMy Public PortalAboutCable Television Advisory -- 2006-01-09 Minutes`,
Minutes of the meeting of the Brewster Cable TV Advisory Committee scheduled for 7:00 pm on Monday
9 January 2006.
The meeting is called to order at 7:07 pm on Monday 9 January 2006 by Larry Greeley.
Members present at this time are:
Larry Greeley
Norman Adams
Carol Chichetto
Walter Powers
Ellie Smith
There is no one present in the audience area.
• The first item of business tonight is review of the minutes for the meeting of 7 December 2005.
Walter Powers makes a motion to approve the minutes as presented, and Larry Greeley seconds the
motion. The motion is passed unanimously, with the abstention of Carol Chichetto on the grounds that she
did not attend that meeting.
• The second item of business tonight is a continuing review and analysis of the interactions of Brewster
and of the CTVAC with Comcast.
Walter Powers mentions the articles appearing recent issues of The Cape Codder concerning the
Community Access activities as supported by the Comcast studio and staff in the Orleans Comcast
building. Walter notes that the equipment deficiencies mentioned, while not a surprise to members of this
committee nor to many other people familiar with those particular Community Access activities, are in
effect issues ofnon-compliance with respect to the Brewster cable TV contract (among others), which
issues must ultimately be resolved appropriately.
The discussion becomes general and, as often before, turns to the difficulty of making progress with
Comcast. There is some discussion about the desirability of preparing and updating suitable records to
support the Brewster side in future discussions with Comcast, including details about non-compliance
issues, particularly in regard to equipment and other hardware issues.
There is some discussion of the apparently increasing frequency of occurrence of the "tiling" type of
signal failure in the TV material distributed by Comcast. There was no general agreement as to how to
obtain meaningful measures of this type of failure, which often involves only one channel and often is
healed withing a minute or less. The only possibly useful expedient suggested was an effort to elicit
reports from the Brewster cable viewing public.
It was remarked that in any case it would be a good idea to attempt to improve our communication with
the Brewster cable viewing public concerning two general areas:
1) matters relating to Community Access programming including what it is, its availability, who creates
it, its usefulness in keeping the townspeople informed about what is happening in town, and so on.
2) matters relating to deficiencies in delivery of the regular programming provided by Comcast to the
customers (such as bad video or audio quality, other kinds of troubles, and service breakdowns).
There is a brief discussion of the most suitable date for the next meeting of this committee. The date of
y
February 2, 2006 is selected. That date is a Thursday. The time would be the usual time (7:00 pm), the
duration would be as usual (less than 2 hours), and the place would be the usual place (the basement of
the Brewster Town Office building).
Whether what has been the nominal standard date -the first Wednesday of the month - is to be replaced is
left open for further discussion at the next meeting.
The meeting seeming to be out of other business to be taken up tonight, Walter Powers makes a motion to
adjourn. [t is seconded by Norman Adams and is passed unanimously at 8:52 pm.
Submitted by Norman Adams, Clerk, Brewster CTVAC