Hours of Operation
 

Monday & Wednesday
             10:30am-6:00pm

  

Tuesday &- Thursday

10:30am-9:30pm

 

Saturday

10:00am - 200pm
(1st & 3rd Only)

 

Sunday & Friday

CLOSED

 

Economic Discrimination: Why Citizens Television is not on AT&T U-Verse 

Residents of New Haven, Hamden and West Haven can receive Citizens Television (CTV) on Comcast channels 26, 27 and 96. And even though they pay the same monthly community access fee as Comcast subscribers do, subscribers to AT&T cannot receive CTV at all.

 Why is that?

The CTV board of directors has persistently voted not to go onto the AT&T U-Verse system for a number of reasons, among which is economic discrimination. AT&T was granted special status by the CT state legislature in 2006 to offer competition to established cable providers in the state (Comcast, Charter, etc.) as a means of driving prices down. But unlike the cable providers, who have to offer their services to any resident in the provider’s service area, AT&T was allowed to cherrypick the neighborhoods they would serve - meaning they could serve only those areas that were most profitable to them. And so, while every resident in the CTV service area can get Comcast, considerably fewer can get AT&T.

Why would a resident choose AT&T over Comcast? One reason: If the cost is cheaper. So residents who can get both Comcast and AT&T have an economic choice that their neighbors just several blocks away do not have. It is outright economic discrimination.

But there are other issues. Recently, CTV spent $75,000 of your money to make its signal of equal quality to the other programs you watch on television. AT&T would hide CTV on a channel with literally all of the other public access stations in the state. Residents would have to search for us. And when found, we would take longer to appear on your screen. And that appearance would not be a regular full television picture, but the inferior image you would get in Windows Media Player on your computer. More discrimination. CTV would not be treated as a real television station, but as a second-rate entity. Your $75,000 would be wasted on the quality of the CTV signal that AT&T would offer its subscribers if we were on their system.

CTV has no financial responsibility for the equipment to run its programs on Comcast. AT&T would require CTV to be financially responsible for the maintenance, repair and replacement of any equipment located at CTV which is needed to show its programming on AT&T.

Not only can so many residents of our area not receive AT&T, but we at CTV cannot receive it.  That means that we cannot see the signal that we would be sending to our AT&T subscribers. We would never know about the quality of the signal we are sending to subscribers or even it they are getting it. If a subscriber called us about the signal, we could not tell if the problem was with us or with AT&T. In short, CTV could not provide AT&T subscribers with any customer service regarding our programming.

What is perhaps most problematic is that AT&T would send our signal not just to CTV viewers, but to all of its subscribers throughout the state. That would stop us from recording live programs that we must limit to our subscriber area. This would affect programs done at the Shubert and Woolsey Hall and on the New Haven Green. It would also cause us to pay substantially for a music license from ASCAP because of the huge increase in homes our signal would be sent to. In short, by going onto AT&T, the diversity of programs offered by CTV would be negatively affected and we could no longer use commercial music in our productions.

Help us out. Call your state Reps and Senators and tell them to roll back the legislation that lets AT&T economically discriminate against all of us and makes public access inferior to commercial television.