More On Northern Summit Cable

Thanks to Bill Jasso of Time Warner Cable for his response to my earlier posting...and thanks for his patience in trying to jump through all the hoops we need to fix to make commenting more friendly and inviting to the site.

In my earlier posting found here I was whining about not getting the Time Warner Akron/Canton News on my former Adelphia now current Time Warner cable system. It's been long enough, I think, for Summit County to again have the benefit of news from our county seat.
Bill Jasso's one of the higher-ups at the cable company (and ex-radio broadcaster) and was gracious enough to get in touch despite frustrations with OUR technology in posting a response;

Ed:

I couldn't post a comment to your blog (on AkronNewsNow - editor) because the story was more than three days old.

The reason the A/C News isn't seen up in the northern most communities of Summit County is because we don't have available channels on expanded basic service up there. Unlike everywhere else in our service area, these six communities require by franchise that we provide six, yes SIX Public, Education and Government access channels on their Basic service. This takes up significant prime channel space for highly duplicated programming, and thus we are unable to carry own local channel (Channel 23 in Greater Akron) up North. The new state law on cable franchises will allow us to move three of the six channels up to Digital Cable, and we will then have the channel space to add our local channel, which includes the Akron/Canton News.

Hope that explains it.

-- Bill

Now you just know the 'burbs making up the old Western Reserve service area won't be happy losing their channels, despite what should be an obvious solution: have Macedonia, Hudson, Twinsburg, Sagamore Hills, Northfield Center and Twinsburg come to terms on sharing those channels. After all, they all seem to do OK on community channel 9 (similar to what Akron viewers see on Channel 15) and Lord knows there's enough hours in the day to carry all those rotating slates telling us when the trash will be picked up Labor Day weekend. The new law notwithstanding (and there's plenty of yapping over that one, too) it will be nice to finally be able to watch what happens in the county we pay taxes in -- and that's not Cuyahoga.

On the subject on comments: I'm a fairly chronic complainer to our own web guys at AkronNewsNow.com (they'll probably note it in their own blogs) about making the site easier to post to...and I know they're working on it. Many bloggers (including Ohio Media Watch) have grown increasingly frustrated at the poor manners shown by commenting. I still believe shy of the deadly curse words and obvious out-of-bounds personal attacks it's important to keep the site open for public posting.

That First Amendment thing again...