Vote for Public Media Related Sessions at SXSW

This exchange at the FCC's April 30 FoM hearing between Ellen Goodman, Joaquin Alvarado, and Nan Rubin speaks to some of kreynen's comments. It starts at 3:35:43 in on the video available here: http://reboot.fcc.gov/futureofmedia/public-and-other-noncommercial-media....

GOODMAN:

Let me ask - we haven't talked about PEG yet today - public, educational, government cable access channels. And in fact PEG has not traditionally been considered part of public media. But when we hear about - it seems that the notions that things that PEG was supposed to do are converging with some of the things that you're talking about. So I'll turn to Joaquin Alvarado and maybe, Maxie Jackson, you can also talk about this.

Should public broadcasting be working with PEG, are there efficiencies there, is that a form of partnership and collaboration that would be fruitful? That's part A. Part B is: Do we need PEG anymore, if - and it really goes to the whole question of access - is access really the problem now, or is it something else?

ALVARADO:

So PEG is extraordinarily complex from a regulatory standpoint and there have been many, many losses, if you were to ask the public interest community around PEG over the last 10 years involving state-wide franchising in the cable industry. And I know that with the Comcast situation, the FCC has a lot of work to do in addressing issues that might come up there.

There are certainly areas of optimization between existing PEG infrastructure and existing public media - as defined by "receives federal monies" - public media infrastructure around the country. The cultures are radically different, and the capacities are radically different. So, it's not something you can ordain and expect to happen. There may be opportunities in certain markets to identify really successful models in answer to that question, and then say, "can we scale this?" I don't think you're going to get a lot of cooperation on the industry side, because they've really put PEG in an awkward position - and that's putting it mildly.

I think importantly, though, access is still a critical issue in this country. We have defined access as important in a million different ways, and the FCC has defined and upheld access as being a critical public interest obligation in markets big and small. So looking at the access question in a broadband environment becomes very important. The National Broadband Plan identified something that has become known as the unified community anchor network, which would address some of the issues confronting public media institutions and other public interest locations around high-speed capacity, but as many people have noted, the cost of supporting broadband engagement and content is not going to go down any time soon, and we're going to severely test either PEG or public media's capacity to serve the public that is increasingly online and needs to be online if we don't deal with the cost structures around serving up broadband. There's a reason why the cloud is located and built by companies that have enormous physical capacity. That's why the data centers of Google are really the thing that allows it to do so many free things, is cause they have so much physical infrastructure, and the physical infrastructure for public information needs has to be addressed, and obviously the FCC has a big role to play in that.

GOODMAN:

But does that suggest that the focus of funding and support should shift from cable to the cloud, or to broadband access, or does it - in the ideal world, everything would be funded - but would you say that our focus ought to shift to broadband?

ALVARADO:

I think that we should always include network engineers and operators in these discussions, because they view it as economies of scale, right? So we could ask that from the Google pipes to the AT&T and Comcast pipes that there always be bandwidth that is available for public interest activities, right? We could ask that of them, and that would reframe a bit what used to be the PEG arrangements where they had to build a TV studio for you - maybe that's less important now than it used to be. But that bandwidth capability is still critical.

RUBIN:

I just wanted to add one more thing to that, because it's not solely the question about access in terms of capacity that Joaquin was talking about, and he's really right, that we really need more of the engineers here to help, but we also can't have them dictate it, because they don't understand a lot of the other dimensions on some of these these.

But, the issue in terms of public media is where the gatekeepers are right now. And PEG has always been sort of to the side of public broadcasting type of activities - and public broadcasting has seen itself as a certain type of a gatekeeper - and PEG has seen itself as another, probably not as much of a gatekeeper, but also as a gatekeeper, and I think what we've been hearing today and I think is really important to keep in mind is that those are the barriers that need to be broken down. That where we're thinking about is where we want to get content, and who's going to be providing it and who's going to be using it. Those silos and those compartments really have broken down - and that also means that the same time looking at public broadcasting needs to be re-conceptualized, I think the whole concept of PEG does, too. But we're all kind of in the pot together now: how do we have that dialogue among ourselves?