Thursday, February 26, 2009
VOD, Maybe the Coolest New Toy Yet
8:36 AM | 
Posted by
Billy Ray |
It took us much longer than we anticipated, but Video On Demand (VOD) is now working on our cable system and should be available to nearly everyone who is taking the digital tier of service (sorry, we still have a few days to work on getting it to work to our Fiber To The Home customers). VOD is chock full of really amazing technology, and, for the most part, the best way for you to come to understand it is to simply start playing with it! Go to your remote and press the "VOD" button if it has one, or simply go to channel 1 and hit enter. Either way, you go to the VOD menu screen and things are pretty intuitive from there.
There is a lot of free content and simply reading the screen lets you know when you are about to view something free versus buying a movie. Don't worry one bit about breaking it! You are not going to do that and don't worry about buying something by accident - the menu prompts you at least twice before you finally confirm your purchase of a movie, so accidents simply should not happen.
Once you choose to watch something on VOD, that movie or event appear on your screen under the menu heading "My Rentals" and they stay there for 24 hours. While in there you can pause, rewind, and replay them as much as you like. What is really, really cool is that, once you have an event in your My Rentals folder, you can watch the movie or event on any digital converter in your house! You can start watching something on the television in your den and then go the bedroom to pick up where you left off and finish watching it there! This is so cool!
Now, all of the content that should be available is not yet populated on our VOD server. I can assure you we are pounding on the programming vendors as hard as humanly possible, but they often ignore us because of our diminutive size. When this is all done, if you are a subscriber to a premium channel like HBO, Showtime, etc., you will also get free content on your personal VOD menu from those services which will be free with your purchase of the premium channel. Unfortunately, this feature is not yet populated. But there is already tons of other programming on there. Movies, both very old and very new, are the main feature on VOD, but there is a lot more stuff. For example, most of the programming on PBS Sprout is also available on the VOD menu. That means if you have a son or daughter who is addicted to Bob the Builder or Thomas the Train (like my grand daughter is), you don't have to record the episodes, they are simply available at the push of a VOD button on your remote!
We will be putting together some long form demonstrations of the VOD system to play on Cable6 and we may be holding EPBU classes to demonstrate it as well, but, really, you can just go to it and start playing. You may even discover features that we did not even know about. It is yours to enjoy Glasgow!
There is a lot of free content and simply reading the screen lets you know when you are about to view something free versus buying a movie. Don't worry one bit about breaking it! You are not going to do that and don't worry about buying something by accident - the menu prompts you at least twice before you finally confirm your purchase of a movie, so accidents simply should not happen.
Once you choose to watch something on VOD, that movie or event appear on your screen under the menu heading "My Rentals" and they stay there for 24 hours. While in there you can pause, rewind, and replay them as much as you like. What is really, really cool is that, once you have an event in your My Rentals folder, you can watch the movie or event on any digital converter in your house! You can start watching something on the television in your den and then go the bedroom to pick up where you left off and finish watching it there! This is so cool!
Now, all of the content that should be available is not yet populated on our VOD server. I can assure you we are pounding on the programming vendors as hard as humanly possible, but they often ignore us because of our diminutive size. When this is all done, if you are a subscriber to a premium channel like HBO, Showtime, etc., you will also get free content on your personal VOD menu from those services which will be free with your purchase of the premium channel. Unfortunately, this feature is not yet populated. But there is already tons of other programming on there. Movies, both very old and very new, are the main feature on VOD, but there is a lot more stuff. For example, most of the programming on PBS Sprout is also available on the VOD menu. That means if you have a son or daughter who is addicted to Bob the Builder or Thomas the Train (like my grand daughter is), you don't have to record the episodes, they are simply available at the push of a VOD button on your remote!
We will be putting together some long form demonstrations of the VOD system to play on Cable6 and we may be holding EPBU classes to demonstrate it as well, but, really, you can just go to it and start playing. You may even discover features that we did not even know about. It is yours to enjoy Glasgow!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Welcome Home Dan Miller!
One strange twist of our recent realignment of our broadcast channels is that we are getting to return an old friend, WSMV, to our lineup on channel 9! This move was completed this morning as the work on our tower was finally completed. For those of you with our digital service and the i-Guide that goes along with it, we hope that WSMV information will be appearing there very soon. The same goes for the old scrolling guide on channel 36. Both should start displaying WSMV on channel 9 very soon.
Dan Miller has been a fixture on WSMV for a very long time. Back in the 80's he disappeared for a while when he agreed to be Pat Sajak's sidekick on his short-lived late night show, but pretty soon he was back where he was supposed to be, at WSMV, as the news anchor there. Seeing him again makes me feel like everything is going to be alright with the world. I hope he has the same effect on you. Of course in 2009 there are multiple ways for you to get your Dan Miller fix. Of course you can now watch him on our channel 9, but you can also read his thoughts on his blog at this link.
As always, thanks for the patience you have shown as we worked to make this change. It was supposed to happen on January 1, but the extensive work that was necessary on the antenna tower combined with some particularly nasty weather to put us a couple of months behind. We hope you now enjoy this new programming choice.
Dan Miller has been a fixture on WSMV for a very long time. Back in the 80's he disappeared for a while when he agreed to be Pat Sajak's sidekick on his short-lived late night show, but pretty soon he was back where he was supposed to be, at WSMV, as the news anchor there. Seeing him again makes me feel like everything is going to be alright with the world. I hope he has the same effect on you. Of course in 2009 there are multiple ways for you to get your Dan Miller fix. Of course you can now watch him on our channel 9, but you can also read his thoughts on his blog at this link.
As always, thanks for the patience you have shown as we worked to make this change. It was supposed to happen on January 1, but the extensive work that was necessary on the antenna tower combined with some particularly nasty weather to put us a couple of months behind. We hope you now enjoy this new programming choice.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Glasgow Gets Smart Grid First
Of late it has been impossible to avoid the term "smart grid." If you watched to Super Bowl, you saw this commercial from GE which features the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz touting the benefits of the smart grid. Additionally, over the las few days nearly every print and on-line publication has had articles like this one about Google's plans relative to managing your electric power consumption.
The Google article should be particularly interesting to us in Glasgow, because we have been promoting this very idea for nearly twenty years. While much of the smart grid discussion revolves around "vaporware" (hardware that is promoted as if you could just buy it off the shelf while, in reality, it does not actually exist), Glasgow's combination of a robust broadband network, a growing number of internet-based electric meters, a growing ZigBee wireless mesh network, and our municipally owned electric power network combine to make up the major components of the smart grid a reality here in Glasgow.
About all that we still need before we can actually start offering smart grid products and services to our customers in Glasgow is a good internet addressable thermostat, a good internet addressable water heater switch, and some very complicated software to make all of these devices work in concert to lower the electric power demand of each individual home. We are not only working on finding these necessary parts, we are also hoping to establish Glasgow as the center of the smart grid world and, hopefully, even convince manufacturers of these devices to come to Glasgow, hire local people, and build the devices in the same community that stepped forward to help develop the technology so many years ago. It is a big dream for sure, but, well, building a municipally owned broadband network was a similarly big dream back in 1988 . . . and we made that one come true!
Want to know how to make your home ready to take advantage of these new devices and the corresponding savings? Well, if your water heater fails over the next few months, you ought to replace it with a high efficiency ELECTRIC water heater. If you are looking to upgrade you heating and air conditioning system, talk to a local HVAC contractor about replacing your old unit with a modern high SEER heat pump. The smart grid is designed to control electric appliances and offer amazing incentives for allowing them to be controlled by the utility. So long as your major appliances are fired by natural gas, you will not be able to participate in the brave new smart grid world.
Once you have the right combination of electric appliances, we hope to be contacting you soon to seek your participation in one of the most important scientific explorations ever. We will be seeking to learn how far customers will be willing to allow the utility to control the temperature of their home and their hot water. At the same time, we will be determining if our long-held theory is correct; we believe that it is possible to use broadband control of major home appliances to provide new electric power generation capacity without burning one additional chunk of coal or building a new nuclear power plant. We think new capacity can be gained by teaching our appliances to use less energy! I hope you will join us in this brave experiment.
The Google article should be particularly interesting to us in Glasgow, because we have been promoting this very idea for nearly twenty years. While much of the smart grid discussion revolves around "vaporware" (hardware that is promoted as if you could just buy it off the shelf while, in reality, it does not actually exist), Glasgow's combination of a robust broadband network, a growing number of internet-based electric meters, a growing ZigBee wireless mesh network, and our municipally owned electric power network combine to make up the major components of the smart grid a reality here in Glasgow.
About all that we still need before we can actually start offering smart grid products and services to our customers in Glasgow is a good internet addressable thermostat, a good internet addressable water heater switch, and some very complicated software to make all of these devices work in concert to lower the electric power demand of each individual home. We are not only working on finding these necessary parts, we are also hoping to establish Glasgow as the center of the smart grid world and, hopefully, even convince manufacturers of these devices to come to Glasgow, hire local people, and build the devices in the same community that stepped forward to help develop the technology so many years ago. It is a big dream for sure, but, well, building a municipally owned broadband network was a similarly big dream back in 1988 . . . and we made that one come true!
Want to know how to make your home ready to take advantage of these new devices and the corresponding savings? Well, if your water heater fails over the next few months, you ought to replace it with a high efficiency ELECTRIC water heater. If you are looking to upgrade you heating and air conditioning system, talk to a local HVAC contractor about replacing your old unit with a modern high SEER heat pump. The smart grid is designed to control electric appliances and offer amazing incentives for allowing them to be controlled by the utility. So long as your major appliances are fired by natural gas, you will not be able to participate in the brave new smart grid world.
Once you have the right combination of electric appliances, we hope to be contacting you soon to seek your participation in one of the most important scientific explorations ever. We will be seeking to learn how far customers will be willing to allow the utility to control the temperature of their home and their hot water. At the same time, we will be determining if our long-held theory is correct; we believe that it is possible to use broadband control of major home appliances to provide new electric power generation capacity without burning one additional chunk of coal or building a new nuclear power plant. We think new capacity can be gained by teaching our appliances to use less energy! I hope you will join us in this brave experiment.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Ice Storm of 09
Well, our lives have not been a bit boring over the last couple of days. How about yours? We spent the day Monday reviewing our disaster plans, fueling vehicles, agreeing on work schedules, stocking trucks, and preparing for the worst. Tuesday morning about 4:00 a.m., the freezing rain commenced and so did our troubles. As usual, no plan really survives contact with the enemy, and some of our plans fell apart, but for the most part everything went quite well.
As we sat in the dispatch center and monitored our substations, it was amazing to view the radar as Glasgow straddled the line between ice and rain. That played out just as it showed on radar as the northern half of our service area was very hard hit by ice and fallen trees, while the southern half escaped with very little damage to our networks. However, just to our north, east and west, our neighboring utilities have not been so lucky. As this is written there are over 62,000 customers of TVA distributors in Kentucky who are still without power. Conversely, there are none here in Glasgow. I would like to say that is because of our great planning, but there is also a large element of luck and geography that must be considered as well.
Still, everything did not go as we wished. Our biggest problem throughout the weather event was, and to some extent continues to be, our telephone connections to the outside world. Our telephone partner, Cinergy (now Norlight) uses a long haul fiber provider called Kentucky Data Link (KDL) and KDL suffered numerous cuts to their fiber lines due to down trees, poles, and simply ice thickness that damaged the cables. While this is not preventable, utilities strive to offset this danger by providing a number of redundant routes to serve an important network like the one serving all of our phone customers in Glasgow. We had been assured by our telephone partner that we were served by multiple redundant routes. However, they were not redundant enough and all of our telephone customers were off for about fourteen hours. We sincerely apologize for that outage and we are already looking to Norlight to rectify this situation.
Speaking of redundancy and diversity of network segments, we also purchase our internet connections to the outside world from more than one vendor so that all of our customers will not be down should one fail. One of those vendors was also KDL and, as a result, many of our internet customers were also without service when KDL’s network was damaged. Even today that connectivity has been up and down some, so, this is not totally over yet.
Finally, one good thing that has come from this event is that we have learned how to use Twitter to keep folks better informed of the status of Glasgow’s critical power and broadband networks. During this event alone some fifty new folks have become Twitter “followers” of Glasgow EPB by going to this site, setting up an account, and choosing to click the “follow” button to be updated when we post new information. We also learned how to have that information automatically appear on our www.glasgow-ky.com web page for those who do not want to jump on Twitter. The service is also capable of sending the information as a text message to your cell phone and we think that would be fantastic since you should be able to get these text messages even if your home has no electric power (so long as your cell phone battery is charged up).
So, that is where we stand after two days of extremely horrible winter weather. We survived better than most, we had some failures of technology, and we learned some new ways to serve our community better in the future. Here’s to hoping that spring is just around the corner!
As we sat in the dispatch center and monitored our substations, it was amazing to view the radar as Glasgow straddled the line between ice and rain. That played out just as it showed on radar as the northern half of our service area was very hard hit by ice and fallen trees, while the southern half escaped with very little damage to our networks. However, just to our north, east and west, our neighboring utilities have not been so lucky. As this is written there are over 62,000 customers of TVA distributors in Kentucky who are still without power. Conversely, there are none here in Glasgow. I would like to say that is because of our great planning, but there is also a large element of luck and geography that must be considered as well.
Still, everything did not go as we wished. Our biggest problem throughout the weather event was, and to some extent continues to be, our telephone connections to the outside world. Our telephone partner, Cinergy (now Norlight) uses a long haul fiber provider called Kentucky Data Link (KDL) and KDL suffered numerous cuts to their fiber lines due to down trees, poles, and simply ice thickness that damaged the cables. While this is not preventable, utilities strive to offset this danger by providing a number of redundant routes to serve an important network like the one serving all of our phone customers in Glasgow. We had been assured by our telephone partner that we were served by multiple redundant routes. However, they were not redundant enough and all of our telephone customers were off for about fourteen hours. We sincerely apologize for that outage and we are already looking to Norlight to rectify this situation.
Speaking of redundancy and diversity of network segments, we also purchase our internet connections to the outside world from more than one vendor so that all of our customers will not be down should one fail. One of those vendors was also KDL and, as a result, many of our internet customers were also without service when KDL’s network was damaged. Even today that connectivity has been up and down some, so, this is not totally over yet.
Finally, one good thing that has come from this event is that we have learned how to use Twitter to keep folks better informed of the status of Glasgow’s critical power and broadband networks. During this event alone some fifty new folks have become Twitter “followers” of Glasgow EPB by going to this site, setting up an account, and choosing to click the “follow” button to be updated when we post new information. We also learned how to have that information automatically appear on our www.glasgow-ky.com web page for those who do not want to jump on Twitter. The service is also capable of sending the information as a text message to your cell phone and we think that would be fantastic since you should be able to get these text messages even if your home has no electric power (so long as your cell phone battery is charged up).
So, that is where we stand after two days of extremely horrible winter weather. We survived better than most, we had some failures of technology, and we learned some new ways to serve our community better in the future. Here’s to hoping that spring is just around the corner!
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Page Two
A few days ago I was shopping in a local business when I noticed some folks examining a smartly styled electric space heater. “This is the one Paul Harvey talks about,” one of the anxious shoppers remarked. “Yes,” replied a bystander, “it is supposed to keep the whole house warm and save you more than 50% on your electric bill.” Now that attracted my full attention. I had not heard Paul Harvey making this proclamation, but I was intrigued. The heater was handsome and it had some very cool looking lights and dials. It even had a remote control! However, when I spun it around to look at the UL label it clearly stated that it was a 1500 watt device. This was a $400, 1500 watt electric heater. Nearby were dozens of other 1500 watt electric heaters, and most of them were about $60, and I can assure you that both will do exactly the same thing. Sadly, no matter what Paul Harvey says, a 1500 watt heater is a 1500 watt heater, at least so far as the cost of operating it goes. I felt bad for the excited shoppers. I felt worse for the scores of folks who might have been romanced by the remote control and the flashing lights on the $400 unit, because they are going to be disappointed when they get their electric bill.
A 1500-watt electric heater, whether it cost $400 or $60, is going to consume 1.5 kWh of electric power each hour that it runs. At today’s inflated cost of electric power that translates into fifteen cents for each hour the heater is running. So, if you are trying to save money by turning back the thermostat on your central heat and using one of these space heaters for the room you spend most of your time in, just running the 1500 watt heater could cost more than $100 per month! If this is going to save you 50% on your heating bill, well, you would likely have to be maintaining the rest of your house at about 55 degrees or so. I hope you realize this is not likely to happen. I wish that was not the case, but the laws of thermodynamics are not alterable, even by a kindly old gentleman like Paul Harvey.
Clearly, folks are looking to believe in something that will give them some relief from the high cost of electricity. If it isn’t the Paul Harvey heater, then the attraction of the “Amish fireplace” must be the answer (sorry, but look closely at those full page advertisements as well . . . the Amish fireplace is just another 1500 watt electric heater). But the truth is there is no technology that is going to change the fact that electric energy is very expensive in 2009 and it is likely to climb even higher.
Why has this happened? Well, this scenario has been developing for several decades. To a large extent, energy is expensive today because it was too cheap for many years. Cheap electric power caused us all to use it carelessly. At our homes we have piled up electronic gear, televisions, computers, video game consoles, DVD players and other appliances use spiraling amounts of power. In our communities, we have demanded, and received, a steady progression of big box retail stores which demand staggering amounts of electric power. Regionally, we have invited, and welcomed many large industrial facilities that consume unbelievable volumes of electric power. For example, a new facility recently announced near Clarksville, Tennessee, will demand more electric power than five Glasgow’s! While all of these loads have drastically increased our net need for electricity, the cost of building and operating new power generation facilities has skyrocketed. So, our present cost of electric power is a direct descendent of our wishes. My mother used to warn me to “be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.” My mother was right. We wished for constant growth, and we got it. Now, the cost of electric power is demonstrating the folly of our old assumption that all growth is good.
It is also not just our history that is driving up the cost of electric power. Our present has a lot to do with it as well. Surely you have heard about TVA’s massive spill of coal ash from the Kingston Steam Plant into the Clinch River. The cost of cleaning up that mess will likely exceed a billion dollars, and every bit of that cost will wind up on our electric bills. Our Congress is also very likely to implement new restrictions on all coal burning power plants. While I am certainly in agreement that we must reduce the amount of CO2 we are dumping into our atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel, there is no way to do this without adding additional cost to each kWh that we consume.
But there are some bright spots in our energy future. Suddenly we have a president who is extolling the virtues of converting our electric power delivery systems to “smart grids.” At the same time, TVA is now actually talking about the virtue of the “infotricity” network that we have been shouting about for twenty years. Perhaps the planets are lining up for us to finally be able to use our broadband network to change the way we use electric power, and that could result in us learning how to actually reduce the amount of power that needs to be generated. In time, this may actually reduce the cost of a kWh of electric power. But, in the short term, the cost of electricity is high and the consumption of a 1500 watt heater is going to be 1.5 kWh per hour . .n . and THAT is the rest of the story!
A 1500-watt electric heater, whether it cost $400 or $60, is going to consume 1.5 kWh of electric power each hour that it runs. At today’s inflated cost of electric power that translates into fifteen cents for each hour the heater is running. So, if you are trying to save money by turning back the thermostat on your central heat and using one of these space heaters for the room you spend most of your time in, just running the 1500 watt heater could cost more than $100 per month! If this is going to save you 50% on your heating bill, well, you would likely have to be maintaining the rest of your house at about 55 degrees or so. I hope you realize this is not likely to happen. I wish that was not the case, but the laws of thermodynamics are not alterable, even by a kindly old gentleman like Paul Harvey.
Clearly, folks are looking to believe in something that will give them some relief from the high cost of electricity. If it isn’t the Paul Harvey heater, then the attraction of the “Amish fireplace” must be the answer (sorry, but look closely at those full page advertisements as well . . . the Amish fireplace is just another 1500 watt electric heater). But the truth is there is no technology that is going to change the fact that electric energy is very expensive in 2009 and it is likely to climb even higher.
Why has this happened? Well, this scenario has been developing for several decades. To a large extent, energy is expensive today because it was too cheap for many years. Cheap electric power caused us all to use it carelessly. At our homes we have piled up electronic gear, televisions, computers, video game consoles, DVD players and other appliances use spiraling amounts of power. In our communities, we have demanded, and received, a steady progression of big box retail stores which demand staggering amounts of electric power. Regionally, we have invited, and welcomed many large industrial facilities that consume unbelievable volumes of electric power. For example, a new facility recently announced near Clarksville, Tennessee, will demand more electric power than five Glasgow’s! While all of these loads have drastically increased our net need for electricity, the cost of building and operating new power generation facilities has skyrocketed. So, our present cost of electric power is a direct descendent of our wishes. My mother used to warn me to “be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.” My mother was right. We wished for constant growth, and we got it. Now, the cost of electric power is demonstrating the folly of our old assumption that all growth is good.
It is also not just our history that is driving up the cost of electric power. Our present has a lot to do with it as well. Surely you have heard about TVA’s massive spill of coal ash from the Kingston Steam Plant into the Clinch River. The cost of cleaning up that mess will likely exceed a billion dollars, and every bit of that cost will wind up on our electric bills. Our Congress is also very likely to implement new restrictions on all coal burning power plants. While I am certainly in agreement that we must reduce the amount of CO2 we are dumping into our atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuel, there is no way to do this without adding additional cost to each kWh that we consume.
But there are some bright spots in our energy future. Suddenly we have a president who is extolling the virtues of converting our electric power delivery systems to “smart grids.” At the same time, TVA is now actually talking about the virtue of the “infotricity” network that we have been shouting about for twenty years. Perhaps the planets are lining up for us to finally be able to use our broadband network to change the way we use electric power, and that could result in us learning how to actually reduce the amount of power that needs to be generated. In time, this may actually reduce the cost of a kWh of electric power. But, in the short term, the cost of electricity is high and the consumption of a 1500 watt heater is going to be 1.5 kWh per hour . .n . and THAT is the rest of the story!
Monday, January 19, 2009
WBKO - The Immaculate Reception
In case you have not heard, WBKO is making the transition to digital broadcasting! Good grief are they ever making the transition. If ever anything has been planned, discussed, promoted, scheduled, re-scheduled, explained, canceled, then finally completed in a more public and convoluted fashion than this transition I don't know what it could have been.
However, we now have it on good authority from WBKO that they have finally, once and for all, finished installing their antenna today. After that call we returned our channels 12, 13, 14, 24, and 513 to normal configuration to receive the signals from this wonderful new digital transmitter and antenna that has taken longer to gestate than a baby elephant. When we say we returned things to normal we also need to express our thanks to the team at SCRTC for helping to deliver a feed for WBKO that was usable during the many times that their regular broadcast signal was off and on during this process over the last couple of months. THANKS SCRTC!
Now, we hate to say this, but...ahem...now we have some antenna work to do on our own tower. Yes, there is still one more change in our broadcast tier that we promised for the first of the year - we still owe you signal from WSMV in Nashville. We also owe you better reception of a couple of our remaining Louisville signals. We plan to do this by replacing our antenna array on our tower sometime over the next couple of weeks - when the weather allows. We will try to keep you updated via Twitter as this work is about to be done so you will be warned about any possible outages which may result from this work. If you have still not started following the EPB Twitter updates, you can do so by clicking this link and following the directions to set up a Twitter account and then click on the "Follow" button for Glasgow EPB.
I really hope that, for Valentines Day we can give you the final and stable collection of broadcast channels we have been promising. Further, I hope to be posting a lot of new information about a new service we have been struggling to complete for you over the last four months - Video On Demand!
However, we now have it on good authority from WBKO that they have finally, once and for all, finished installing their antenna today. After that call we returned our channels 12, 13, 14, 24, and 513 to normal configuration to receive the signals from this wonderful new digital transmitter and antenna that has taken longer to gestate than a baby elephant. When we say we returned things to normal we also need to express our thanks to the team at SCRTC for helping to deliver a feed for WBKO that was usable during the many times that their regular broadcast signal was off and on during this process over the last couple of months. THANKS SCRTC!
Now, we hate to say this, but...ahem...now we have some antenna work to do on our own tower. Yes, there is still one more change in our broadcast tier that we promised for the first of the year - we still owe you signal from WSMV in Nashville. We also owe you better reception of a couple of our remaining Louisville signals. We plan to do this by replacing our antenna array on our tower sometime over the next couple of weeks - when the weather allows. We will try to keep you updated via Twitter as this work is about to be done so you will be warned about any possible outages which may result from this work. If you have still not started following the EPB Twitter updates, you can do so by clicking this link and following the directions to set up a Twitter account and then click on the "Follow" button for Glasgow EPB.
I really hope that, for Valentines Day we can give you the final and stable collection of broadcast channels we have been promising. Further, I hope to be posting a lot of new information about a new service we have been struggling to complete for you over the last four months - Video On Demand!
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
One Last Post About Cable Channel Changes
For those of you who read this blog regularly this is going to sound very familiar. We have discussed it already quite a lot, but confusing crawls across the bottom of many of our cable channels are resulting in phone calls to our switchboard, so this is one more attempt to explain what is happening.
First thing first. The big news all over many cable news shows today is about a battle between Viacom (owners of several cable channels like: Comedy Central, CMT: Pure Country, MTV, MTV 2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, MTV Tr3s, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Nicktoons, Spike, The N, TV Land, VH1, VH1 Classic, and VH1 Soul) are in a bitter cost dispute with cable systems owned by Time Warner. Apparently Time Warner is refusing to pay what Viacom is asking beginning on January 1 and they are willing to express that displeasure by turning all those channels off as the ball drops tonight on Time Square. While this is exciting, it has nothing to do with us here in Glasgow. No matter what happens in this dispute, it will not impact your programming from Glasgow EPB.
It would be wonderful if that were the end of the story, but, it isn't. Hundreds of small independent cable operators like us are also in a dispute with NBCU (owners of cable channels on our system like: MSNBC, CNBC, USA, BRAVO, SCI-FI and NBCU-HD). While we are fairly confident that we will reach an agreement with them on price, there continues to be the chance that NBCU will turn these channels off until we reach an agreement. If you wake up to nothing on these channel positions on New Year's Day, this would be the reason.
Other changes are the ones we have talked about many times over the last month. The latest information on these changes can be seen by watching EPB Cable6.
Oh, and Happy New Year!!
First thing first. The big news all over many cable news shows today is about a battle between Viacom (owners of several cable channels like: Comedy Central, CMT: Pure Country, MTV, MTV 2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, MTV Tr3s, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Nicktoons, Spike, The N, TV Land, VH1, VH1 Classic, and VH1 Soul) are in a bitter cost dispute with cable systems owned by Time Warner. Apparently Time Warner is refusing to pay what Viacom is asking beginning on January 1 and they are willing to express that displeasure by turning all those channels off as the ball drops tonight on Time Square. While this is exciting, it has nothing to do with us here in Glasgow. No matter what happens in this dispute, it will not impact your programming from Glasgow EPB.
It would be wonderful if that were the end of the story, but, it isn't. Hundreds of small independent cable operators like us are also in a dispute with NBCU (owners of cable channels on our system like: MSNBC, CNBC, USA, BRAVO, SCI-FI and NBCU-HD). While we are fairly confident that we will reach an agreement with them on price, there continues to be the chance that NBCU will turn these channels off until we reach an agreement. If you wake up to nothing on these channel positions on New Year's Day, this would be the reason.
Other changes are the ones we have talked about many times over the last month. The latest information on these changes can be seen by watching EPB Cable6.
Oh, and Happy New Year!!
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