Camden Maine station off the air due to storm damage

[Aaron Read]

This bit about how Idaho's governor is zeroing-out state funding for 
Idaho Public TV, appearing on Current's website on March 4th, I think is 
directly relevant to this discussion:

http://www.current.org/2010/03/state-funding-cuts-pose-greatest.html

The bottom line is that non-comm's are under tremendous fiscal 
restrictions compared to their commercial counterparts.  Personally I 
think this ultimately makes for a far better broadcast product, but it 
also means that without subsidies, public broadcasting cannot afford to 
chase unprofitable regions/audiences.

Check out the laundry list here:
http://idahoptv.org/about/belongstoyou/effects.cfm

Note how they say that they'd have to kill off 39 of their 40 TV 
translators, and that they'd be forced to focus their service to 
southwest Idaho where **82%** of their contributions (individual and 
corporate) come from.  (emphasis mine)

I'm sure there's some grandstanding going on here, but I'll bet that if 
the governor succeeds, IPTV will go ahead with the cuts pretty much as 
they specify on that site.

I'm sure MPBN is little different; why should they chase after audiences 
in regions that are likely to cost more money than they could possibly 
earn from?

If you don't like how statewide public broadcasting networks only serve 
the "rich" areas, you ought to complain to your elected officials who 
have never stopped trying to slash public broadcasting subsidies for the 
last 30 years!

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Read                  |  Finger Lakes Public Radio
friedbagels@gmail.com       |  General Manager (WEOS & WHWS-LP)
Geneva, NY 14456            |  www.weos.org / www.whws.fm


 > Contributions top the need for a statewide network in terms of
 > importance to MPBN.
 >

Well, I did say "as much of the state's residents AS IS FEASIBLE"
(emphasis mine).  If you know you're going to get more money and get it
faster in Camden than in, say Moosehead Lake, then it's smart ROI to
built in Camden first.  I would also opine that you'd have to build
either one huge facility...or more likely, several quite-large
facilities...to adequately cover NW ME thanks to the terrain issues and
extremely low population density.  So maybe it's just not economically
feasible to build out facilities in those regions at all?  Honestly I
don't know; I'm just wildly speculating.