Save Public Access TV! Update!

On Monday February 23rd San Francisco Community TV Corp. or Access SF held a press conference and rally outside San Francisco's City Hall in hopes of rallying supporters, viewers, and producers over the inevitable fight to Save Public Access TV. Locally Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi has become a hero for SF's public access station because he has brought before the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee a resolution, if passed, will in-effect bring to light the plight of public access TV on a Federal and Statewide level. However this resolution still has to go before the full board, which may happen sometime in the beginning of March 2009.

Many people turned out for the Press Conference and Rally, and afterwards a spirited crowd chanted in San Francisco's City Hall "Save Access" "Save Our Station" "We Want Access"
and even made the Sheriff angry who then ordered us to be quiet. To say the least some producers became disenchanted.
During the meeting, a very diverse group of people spoke in favor of saving public access TV including Diane Baker, John Higgins, and many, many producers. The meeting was impressive, and the turnout was huge, but one key element was missing.

No one from the cable companies attended that meeting or at least they did not make their presence known....

If you're wondering?

it is the cable companies who take the money for PEG channels but they do not support those channels because they are worth millions of dollars if they are given up and used for commercial programming.
Currently cable companies charge their clients an average of $5.00 per bill to pay for PEG channels.

If there are no other bidders, and no action is taken by the San Francisco Government, San Francisco's public access station will drastically reduce hours, and will shut the studio doors, and the SFCTC will cease to run that station, on June 30, 2009.
The Department of Technology http://www.sfgov.org/site/dtis_index.asp
has submitted the Request for Proposals, but in it they were only giving up 120,000 annually to run the public access station. Barry Frazer from the Dept. of Technology admitted to various Supervisors "that station cannot be operated on that amount."


Please consider going to SF's public access station and please consider joining our Coalition to Save Your Station. http://accessf.org/soscoalition/