Sean McLaughlin, executive director of Access Humboldt writes: “I’ll be there in the cheering section for local efforts to develop community broadband – calling for sustainable, next generation media access through community anchor networks that serve public, education and government purposes.”

The honorees include Merit Network and MCNC, who both received Recovery Act grants for broadband infrastructure projects that are currently underway and connecting community anchor institutions, including schools, libraries, and hospitals, to high-speed Internet.

The White House event will be telecast live online today at www.whitehouse.gov/live at 1:30PM EST.

Also invited was Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, whose stated goal is to “advance communications services to rural America”.  She had to decline, however, as the White House event coincided with the NTCA’s Annual Convention in San Diego, CA.

Of course TelVue is at the NTCA, booth #313  –>

Stop by and visit with Mark Myslinski, TelVue’s Director of Systems Engineering for Cable & Telco TV, and Tom Carey, Sales Manager for the Western Region and Canada.

CMDN is maintained by TelVue as a service to the Alliance for Community Media, a coalition of access stations across the country.

Dan Pisarski, TelVue’s Engineering VP, explains:  “While traditional storage stores the drives in only the front of the server, this unit stores drives throughout the depth of the server, creating room for more than 100 terabytes of storage in just 5 rack units.  The high density provides easier future expansion, and makes it easier for us to mirror that storage in a second location.  Not only is the single unit highly redundant (including redundant power supplies, redundant drives, redundant storage controllers, redundant backplanes, etc.), but important data is stored in more than one unit or location.”

The units will go live in the next two to three weeks.

“TelVue has been great to work with”, says Debbie Rudman, PhillyCam’s Programming Director.  We’re luck that we’re coming online in the digital era, and can start off with everything digital.  The interface enables us to have good control over sending out programs over multiple platforms.”

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and the PhillyCam board countdown to live

It is a dream that took more than twenty years to come to fruition.  After years of negotiation and community support, PhillyCam finally went on the air in late 2009, from a temporary facility.  It has since raised enough funds to renovate a permanent home at 699 Ranstead Street, just one block West of Independence Hall.

“The TelVue servers give PhillyCam a head start as a ‘born-digital’ PEG facility”, explains Denise Rolfe, TelVue’s Manager of Hosted Broadcasting Sales.  “This gives the station great flexibility to cablecast digitally, stream online, offer videos-on-demand, and even program remotely.”

PhillyCam is hosting an open house Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 6pm, at their new headquarters, and will air a live broadcast from the new studio starting at 7pm.  PhillyCam is on Comcast 66/966 & Verizon 29/30.  If you’re not in the Philly area, you’ll be able to watch it at phillycam.org.

TelVue's PEG.TV player embedded in the PhillyCam website

Mark Myslinski, TelVue’s Director of Systems Engineering for Cable & Telco TV, notes in a new report that technology can help overcome the factors that have so far been holding back the potential of local-origination programming.

“Through economies of scale and a little innovation,” Myslinski writes, “network operators can take this low-value channel real estate and transform it into programming of tangible value”.

Among his proposals:

• using cloud-based services to enlarge the pool of content contributors
• streamlining the workflow to transcode content for multiple-screen delivery
• facilitation of ad insertion
• automating program guide information

Key to it all, Myslinski writes, is the spirit of cooperation at the regional level, not only for economies of scale, but for the community-building experience.

Mark Myslinski will be representing TelVue at the upcoming NTCA conference, Feb 14-15, in San Diego.

Download report:  Local Origination and Community Media Empowered by Economies of Scale

San Juan is hosting the 2012 annual meeting of the Caribbean Cable and Telecommunications Association, where you can find TelVue’s own Jerry Budge and Henry Lisenbee, in booth #12.

Go introduce yourselves!

(See photo. Post answers in comments below.  Come back tomorrow for the answer.)

Getting ready for a conference

Changes include:

- Denise Rolfe promoted to Manager, Hosted Broadcasting Sales, a reflection of her involvement with TelVue’s latest Cloud-based broadcasting products for media companies.

- Donna Liu was recently hired as Director, New Media Services, with a focus on business development and marketing communications of TelVue’s new cloud video services.

- Jerry Budge promoted to Manager, Sales Support Team, which includes Jacque Scherer, Jacque Armstrong and Jen Mannon. This new expanded team will provide support to the sales reps by managing resellers, trade show design and graphics, product collateral, training material production, TelVue Care sales and customer support issues.

- Mark Myslinski promoted to Director, Systems Engineering – Cable & Telco TV.

- William Ocampo was recently hired as Regional Sales Representative – Latin America. William will cover sales in all of Latin America, an emerging market for TelVue.

- Henry Lisenbee will cover the Caribbean Region for Cable & Telco Markets.

- Tom Carey will cover Canada for Cable & Telco Markets.

A product demo at the TelVue team's recent Annual Sales Meeting

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