HAMILTON – Like many community cable channels, Cable 14 has been airing bingo for some time. Half a century, in fact.
To some, that may sound like something from a quaint, bygone era we’ve forgotten about where your grandma would the only one who would still care to watch and play along. However, it’s the second-most popular piece of programming on the channel’s schedule (behind the OHL’s Hamilton Bulldogs games), and it’s not just for the blue-hair set.
“You see people watching it in bars and restaurants now. They’re tuning it in and they’re selling bingo cards there. There are bingo parties going on at all sorts of places,” says Bill Custers, Cable 14’s programming and operations manager in a recent interview.
“The (local service clubs) are having a banner year as a result of that… The bars love it, because they're getting patrons in the bar buying food, buying drink and then you've got an hour-plus committed. They're playing it in concerts and social clubs as well, they're doing wingos – a wings and bingo night,” adds general manager Brent Rickert.
Something old is new again – and both Rickert and Custers are hoping their enhanced online platform can make that cliché apply to the whole channel.
In fact, community cable itself is considered by some to be quaint and from a bygone era – and it is actually under fire right now. Thanks to a recent CRTC decision which allows the vertically integrated companies to shift funds from the community stations to local broadcasters, Rogers and Shaw so far have closed or shrunken a number of their outlets, in favour of sending the funds drawn from subscriber bills for local Canadian content to CityTV and Global Television, respectively.
Cable 14 is something of an anomaly since it has always been an independent channel run by a board of directors representing the various cable companies in Hamilton (which used to be as many as six and is now down to two, Cogeco and Rogers) and it has recently been pushing itself into the online streaming world. It launched Cable 14 Now 18 months ago, and recently upgraded the system to make it quicker and easier for viewers to use, and for its 20 employees and 130 volunteers to archive and share content.
Everything on Cable 14 is live-streamed on Cable 14 Now and the site even offers a second live stream ready for programming conflicts (such as when a hockey game and city council are scheduled at the same time). Hundreds of hours of its original content is all available for on demand viewing for authenticated Rogers (wireless or cable) and Cogeco Cable customers.
While Cable 14 provides all the content, the back end work has been done by two Hamilton companies: Clearcable and Hifyre. Clearcable has the content distribution network and has built the backend workflow system meshing with Cable 14’s Volicon system while Hifyre does the web and graphics design work.
Part of the upgrades recently rolled out in the system makes staff more efficient and allows for faster, easier sharing of live video. “We can actually go into this file as it's playing out, at any point in time, to mark an in point and an out point on it and we can take that file and we can export it immediately,” explains Custers.
“So, someone can be (in the Cable 14 office) during a Bulldogs game where a goal is scored, they can sub-clip that goal, and within a few seconds, send it out to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube for us.
“It really opens up a non-traditional volunteer role for someone who might be physically handicapped and couldn't necessarily work a camera or work on a mobile, but we could get them to send that goal to social media as a 10 or a 15 second clip saying, ‘Bulldogs just scored. Catch the rest of the game on Cable 14’.”
“As they get older and they're already used to getting content online, we have to be there with the local content.” – Bill Custers, Cable 14
Until the upgrade developed by Clearcable and implemented in March, that wasn’t possible, and archiving and uploading files for the on demand online platform was more time-consuming. “In the first version we released a year and a half ago, someone was going in, taking the show that aired last night, marking the in point, marking the out point, downloading it to their desktop and then uploading it to Cable 14 Now and putting in all of the same metadata,” adds Custers. Now most of that is automated, so “what might taken an hour before would take ten minutes now.”
All of this makes Cable 14 more modern and more responsive to its community and, they hope, future-proofs it even for today’s millennials who may not ever watch the linear Cable 14 on a TV set, or be interested in watching an hours-long city council debate. The near-real-time ability to take clips and disseminate them quickly online is something consumable for most – and especially desirable for the civic-minded.
“With the amount of content (millennials) are watching online, we need to have a foot in the door,” said Custers. “As they get older and they're already used to getting content online, we have to be there with the local content.”
“Millennials are now looking to their community and looking to affect change in their local community,” agrees HiFyre’s Matt Hollingshead, whose office is full of them. “Part of that is being educated on what's happening in the community and I think that's part of where Cable 14's importance is going to be and online is where it's going to need to be or in an app or on a set top box.” There’s no Cable 14 Now app, yet, however.
“There is robust local content people should be able to see or could be able to see in markets where perhaps there is a shortage of local content for whatever reason,” adds Clearcable’s Rob McCann. “I think that that's probably what the big guys are missing right now, that depth of actual content development.
“Communities are looking to outlets like Cable 14 to generate content for them or to capture things like the city council meetings. I think that's going to be the message for the next number of years. It's all about the community and the investments communities are going to make there.”
