Acknowledging the informal competition between Groton and Harvard local access TV, Selectman Peter Warren, liaison to the Cable Committee from the Board of Selectmen, chuckled during the last Cable Committee meeting and said, “When I turn on our channels and the programming is full, and I turn to Groton’s channel and there’s nothing—it’s a good feeling.” A grin of pride was evident on many faces after Warren’s comment.
Warren was responding to the news that the committee now has the ability to run programming on both channels 12 and 13, thanks to a new server. At the June 9 meeting, Cable Committee member Mitch Norcross gave an update on the new server. “It’s been running three weeks now, and it’s made a big difference,” he said. “The goal is to allow us to be more productive. It will take awhile to ramp up our programming.” He added that John Ball, who prepares videos for viewing, is now able to do more than he was before. Ball said he’d been very busy latetly, keeping up with new demand.
Complimenting the team on how much they accomplished in the past 60 days, Chairwoman Pat Natoli said, “I think what we’ve done, what we’ve accomplished, is great.”
Ball and Norcross identified several minor problems with the broadcasting of DVD programs. One is that occasionally the actual length of a program is not the same as the time listed on the label of the DVD. Ball noted that it might be incorrect by only 20 or 30 seconds, but sometimes it is off by as much as three minutes, resulting in three minutes of blank programming. Norcross encouraged the team to monitor the actual time before putting the product on the server. He pointed out that on one occasion an entire file was empty, resulting in a blank screen for half an hour.
“We knew when we anticipated running two channels that we would run into problems,” Natoli said. “These are small items that we will deal with as they arise.”
Norcross told the committee that he had acquired a new disk drive, as the one on his computer, which he uses for Cable Committee work, is getting full. He noted that another primary disk drive was needed. The committee voted to reimburse him $120 for the backup drive.
Natoli told the three cameramen and film editors—Ben Jackson, Leo Perro, and Casey Clark—that she would like to see a faster turnaround on getting filmed events into the program. “With graduation over, there’s a bit of a lull, and I’d like to see about a week—we should be able to turn what is filmed around right away,” she challenged them. She added, “You guys are really good about looking for new product,” and said she was looking forward to a story on the Farmers’ Market, as well as filming of events for the Fourth of July.