Westwood Community Access Television is using a simple, but powerful combination of old and new media technology to jumpstart their efforts to bring public access TV to Westwood, Massachusetts. While the administrative and technical details for taking control of local origination programming are still underway, we are using Ustream to livecast from our minimalist control room in the basement of Town Hall.
The signal below is a taste of what you will see when we do go live. It is very much a work in progress and may not always be on, but we wanted to get something up and running and start to gather feedback–and demonstrate the progress we are making.
The truly clever idea our Director, Greg Moberg, came up with–after we successfully did a live webcast of a town meeting–was to take the output from our video server and use it as an input to the equipment (a NewTek Tricaster) we had used to webcast. We created a free account on Ustream and configured it to livecast directly from the Tricaster. This allows us to operate all the equipment in the basement as if we were live…and then just route it to the web. One day, we swap cables and this signal will be broadcast on the local cable channels too.
In the meantime, we have a sort of alpha soft-launch. We can share the site with people and begin to develop our schedule, programming calendar and start generating interest in the community. We have a long way to go–if you watch the channel now you mostly see canned content from the video server vendor–but we will soon be broadcasting the public meetings we have taped.
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