TV Talk: Pittsburgh’s public access cable channel PCTV to shutter
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PCTV, public access cable channel Pittsburgh Community Television, will cease operations by the end of August due to a dearth of funding.
“The continuing decline in cable subscribers and the changing media landscape has had a devastating impact on our funding and our viability,” PCTV executive director John Patterson wrote in a letter this week announcing the closure. “While we have increased our fees in recent years, we felt we couldn’t keep increasing costs to the community. Without new sources of funding, we see no alternative but to cease operations.”
PCTV launched in the early 1980s and is currently carried by Comcast (Channel 21/1070) and Verizon (Channel 47) and it’s also available via streaming on Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, via an iOS app and on its website, pctv21.org.
Programming on all platforms will cease after Aug. 30.
In a phone interview Thursday, Patterson said PCTV’s funding primarily came from cable franchise agreements the city negotiated with Comcast and Verizon, but those franchise fees were no longer enough to sustain PCTV due to declining cable subscriptions. PCTV also received income from user fees, some grant funding and payment for production services, often from non-profits, including Confluence Ballet Company, the League of Women Voters and a local chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.
Patterson and two other full-time employees will spend September shuttering the operation at 1300 Western Ave. on the North Side and relocating equipment (it belongs to the City of Pittsburgh) and then they will be out of jobs.
“We exhausted every avenue to try to keep it open,” Patterson said. “With the decline in funding (from cable franchise agreements), we were not able to replace that so it became quite apparent we were not going to be able to continue.”
Some of the longer-running programs on PCTV include the religious program “Swords of Light” and non-religious shows “Steel City Sports World” and “The Boxing Authorities.”
Heidi Norman, the City of Pittsburgh’s director of innovation and performance, said in addition to declining cable subscribers, enhanced personal communication systems implemented over the pandemic reduced the number of people paying to use PCTV’s services.
“We’re so grateful for the decades that PCTV has served the community,” she said. “They were the organization in town that gave everyday residents a voice to communicate with their neighbors over television. In this day and age, particularly over the pandemic, what we learned is people are able to find a voice and share it with their neighbors around the world without the need to go into a studio and work with television and public access channels.”
Norman said the city intends to have plans in place to support public access to media by the end of the year. Next year, money from the cable franchise fee that would have gone to PCTV will instead go to Pittsburgh City Channel, a government channel carried by Comcast (Channel 14/1074) and Verizon (Channel 44), for buying equipment and upgrading its control room. Another portion of the franchise fee money will be earmarked for Pittsburgh’s parks department, which plans to build three digital media hubs in city recreation centers (Ammon, Warrington, and Thaddeus Stevens rec centers) where members of the community can learn how to create digital media.
PCTV is currently available in around 50,000 households, Patterson said, and he’s heard from community members who independently produced TV programs that air on PCTV.
“They’ve expressed a lot of sadness that we’re closing,” he said. “It was heavily used by the African American community. I think they felt it was a place they were welcome to come and that potentially could be lost. We did have a lot of non-profits that used it. It was a low-cost way for them to produce media. My hope is people will be able to continue producing and find other outlets.”
While PCTV is the only public access cable channel of its kind in the City of Pittsburgh, Patterson said the suburbs offer Bethel Park public access, Moon Community Access and a Peters Township educational channel.
“We do not blame the City of Pittsburgh for the closure of PCTV,” Patterson wrote in his letter to PCTV supporters. “The city has funded PCTV through the cable franchises for the last 38 years. Unfortunately, the city is being impacted by the death of cable TV as well, and we understand why they are no longer able to fund PCTV.”
‘Watson’ at MIPCOM
CBS’s upcoming Pittsburgh-set medical/investigative drama “Watson,” which filmed for a couple of days in Pittsburgh in June and is now filming the majority of its scenes in Vancouver, B.C., will have its world premiere Oct. 20 at MIPCOM Cannes in Cannes, France, where TV series get sold to international markets. Star Morris Chestnut and series creator Craig Sweeny, a Squirrel Hill native, will attend.
“Watson,” which is expected to air Sunday nights on CBS beginning in early 2025, follows Watson (Chestnut) a year after the death of Sherlock Holmes as Watson resumes his medical career.
Channel surfing
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