I was sitting in the bleachers of an indoor skating rink watching my five-year-old learn to skate, his first step toward becoming the next Corey Crawford, when I noticed something mounted high on the cinderblock wall. A platform sat about fifteen feet off the ground with what looked like a television camera tucked beneath a weathered tarp. A bundle of cables disappeared into the ceiling.
My first thought was, someone is broadcasting these games.
Then I spotted a small booth overlooking the rink. In my mind, that’s where the technical director sat, switching camera angles, recording the feed, maybe even yelling at the cameramen over an intercom. I caught myself wondering if they ever needed camera operators. Spending a Saturday shooting beer league hockey didn’t sound like a bad retirement gig.
A sign along the boards invited people to “Watch the Game” with a URL underneath. I tried it, only to discover the stream was behind a paywall.
Curious, I looked up the rink later that evening.
Turns out the cameras weren’t what I thought they were. The arena partnered with a service that captures the games automatically with technology that follows the puck. Magic!
Later, I learned it wasn’t a camera at all under the tarp. It was a spotlight for ice shows.
My first career was in public access television, a product of the agreements cable companies made with the cities they wanted to serve. In exchange for access to the public right-of-way to run their cables, municipalities often negotiated community benefits.
In Evanston, Illinois, that meant more than just HBO. The local cable provider built a wide-area network connecting city buildings and schools for communications and video. They also funded and operated a state-of-the-art television studio where anyone in the community could learn to produce their own programming.
That was public access television.
For a couple of decades, it democratized a medium that had previously been out of reach. If you had an idea for a show, you didn’t need to own cameras, editing equipment, or a television station. You could reserve studio time, borrow professional equipment, and put your program on the local cable channel alongside everyone else’s.
By the time I arrived at the station, the equipment was showing its age. We had old tube cameras! In the late 1990s, I helped the station move from analog to digital. Using our own capital funds and city support, we replaced nearly everything: cameras, playback equipment, monitors, and the production gear that kept the station running.
I also served as the City of Evanston’s cable liaison, producing programming for the city’s municipal access channel. My primary responsibility was broadcasting City Council meetings.
On the second floor of the Civic Center was a small control room with two racks where I spent many Monday evenings. Three wall-mounted cameras fed into a video switcher. Beside it sat an audio mixer, a graphics system for titles, tape decks, monitors, and enough wiring to connect everything together. I’d arrive before the meeting, wait for the committee sessions to wrap up, and then switch Channel 16 over to a live broadcast from the council chambers. Oh the power I had!
Later, when the city upgraded to digital equipment, I helped evaluate and select the replacement systems. The new remotely controlled cameras produced a much better picture and could be operated from a joystick in the control room.
At the time, it felt very simple, leaving me time to ignore the politics to secretly watch Jordan-era Bulls games.
Looking back, it amazes me how much infrastructure one person needed just to put a City Council meeting on television.
The internet slowly changed the equation. As digital cameras became affordable and broadband connections became commonplace, fewer people needed a community television studio to share their ideas. Then YouTube arrived and accelerated the shift.
Suddenly, the barriers to creating video nearly vanished. A webcam, a microphone, and an internet connection were enough to reach an audience far larger than most public access programs ever could. What had once required hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, dedicated facilities, and a production team could now be accomplished by one person from a spare bedroom.
Public access didn’t really lose. It just became unnecessary.
Standing in that ice rink, I instinctively started looking for all of that equipment. The cameras. The switcher. The control room. The operator.
None of it was there.
I was hoping there was still a guy sitting in a booth somewhere switching cameras.
There wasn’t…
They’d compressed the whole damned thing into a few cameras bolted to the rafters and a website.
I had lived through this kind of transition once before with YouTube. I just didn’t realize I was watching it happen again.