Centre County could see a third public television channel come this winter thanks to a recent franchise deal.
After four years of negotiations, the Centre Area Cable Consortium (CACC) and cable provider Comcast approved a $240,000 franchise deal -- an agreement that will govern Centre County public television for the next 10 to 15 years.
CACC could develop a third channel that may join existing educational and governmental access channels, C-NET Executive Director Cynthia Hahn said. The channel could hit the airwaves anytime after Feb. 17, the national digital conversion date.
C-NET, a non-profit organization, administers the operation of Centre County's two currently existing public channels.
"It depends on what a community wants," Hahn said of what the new channel could be. "It could be everything from a station that does nothing but accept tapes to play on the air to a full-service media center with a studio."
Hahn said she expects much of the deal's $240,000 capital grant to be transferred to C-NET for expenditures such as equipment purchases for the channel.
Speculation of a public access channel is premature, Hahn said, as such an endeavor would cost at least $100,000.
"The $100,000 is a very, very bare-bones operation," she said. "You want to do something right. You want to do something that really serves people. It is not an inexpensive proposition."
To obtain the third channel, Hahn said, an average of 60 percent of C-NET's programming between 7 and 11 p.m. must be locally generated during a six-month period.
"That's not a hurdle," she said.
It would be the responsibility of CACC to pursue and generate programming for any new channel, Hahn said.
Amy Farkas, Harris Township manager and a member of the CACC negotiating team, said it appears that area residents wants CACC to create a public access channel, but the cable consortium is waiting for a volunteer organization to step forward and offer to run it.
"There's a large groundswell of support from the community," she said. "We're not going to get public access unless a volunteer group steps forward to run it."
Hahn said it is important for CACC to realize the amount of funding and manpower necessary to launch a third channel.
"I don't think that the CACC really has a firm idea of what they want to do with that third channel, and it is their decision," she said. "It's one thing to be interested, and it's another thing to be able to fund it."
The newly negotiated franchise agreement is expected to automatically extend by five years when the original agreement expires in 2018, Hahn said.
