WestCAT Looks to Unite Westwood Through Cable Access Television

While residents of Westwood might have access to watch the latest town meetings through their Comcast or Verizon service, they aren't necessarily getting footage of everything that's going on in town.

That's where WestCAT comes in.

Westwood Community Access Television, Inc., is a nonprofit organization dedicated to uniting Westwood residents through local video programming. While still a young organization, WestCAT aims to ultimately get a variety of regular programming up and running for the town's residents.

WestCAT comprises a seven-member board that was assembled in April 2008 by the Westwood Board of Selectmen.

"The Board had charged us with identifying a cable access strategy for the town," said John Craine, chairman of WestCAT. "The Communication and Technology Advisory Board (CTAB) had this responsibility of starting up this cable access operation for the town."

Currently, WestCAT operates through its own website, WestCAT.tv, where it displays live feeds of programs from a broadcast server. Presently, Channel 8 plays recordings of the latest meetings for several of the town's boards and committees, which residents can access through Comcast or Verizon service.

But WestCAT hopes to eventually provide more than just footage of town government in action, offering programs that revolve around town sports and school-related arts programs.

"The programming gets stale pretty quickly," Craine said. "Right now our biggest challenge is working out the kinks to the workflow so we can get it from the camera to the broadcast server without having to employ a lot of hours of person time in between."

WestCAT currently does not operate out of a studio, but rather footage is edited through a computer and uploaded to the website.

"We're looking at other technologies that will allow us to record right to DVD," Craine said.

Craine and the rest of WestCAT's board have discussed potential locations throughout town for a WestCAT studio, one of them being at Westwood High School, which Craine said would make sense if the channel could eventually set up sports and/or student-run programs.

But the high school, Craine said, would be difficult, as there is a level of security access to the bathrooms in the school. All public entering the school needs to be acknowledge by school officials, and while there were ways to isolate the studio from much of the high school, it wasn't possible to isolate it from the bathrooms. As a result, the board has decided to put a studio location on the back burner for the time being.

"We stepped back and said let's look at this in terms of getting the operation up and running on the air so the programming is available to people, and let's look at the studio stuff down the road."

Moreover, the group hopes to eventually raise enough funds to hire someone to operate and run WestCAT on a full-time basis.

At the moment, Greg Moberg works as WestCAT's Acting Executive Director of Production and "equipment guru". Moberg formerly worked with Norton Public Access, and has been able to bring in the expertise the group needed to evolve accordingly, even though it has been on a part-time basis.

"He's been really trying, in sort of baby steps, to get to the point where we have a regular schedule of events that we cover," Craine said.

Funded partially through franchise fees that are paid to Westwood by Comcast and Verizon, WestCAT currently runs on less than $40,000 a year to operate.

"We have the streaming capability set up, are working out the program library at the moment, and we've got our community bulletin board set up (on the website)," Craine said. But, he added, WestCAT is "not set up to go directly to the cable yet, and the reason is that the CTAB is in the middle of renegotiating the contract for the franchise agreement, and we've been advised to back off until a viable negotiation is under way."

Once a negotiation is in place, there is a waiting period to get the correct modulation set up through Comcast to be able to broadcast through television.

"When the cable modulator is ready to be installed and hooked up, our operation is under way, all we have to do is basically throw a switch," Craine said. "It's taken us a long time to get to this point, but realistically we're not that far way from being a full time broadcast."

Dave Atkins, WestCAT's clerk, says he's excited to see the potential of bringing on a new, unique broadcast experience to Westwood's residents.

"It'd be a great service to have another channel for connecting and informing residents about things in Westwood," Atkins said. "I hope that we start to see people creating their own shows eventually, creating their own video and broadcasting sports and arts, and things that go on at the high school in particular. I think that it's an opportunity to have information that's just about Westwood, and it's a way to reach everybody in town."