I work in PEG access television and had the pleasure to present at the Alliance for Community Media national conference.

PEG (public, educational and government) access television is a model that provides local residents access to the local cable systems in their communities to produce and distribute their local perspectives within their cities. A lot of stuff comes along with that deal from the cable company, from the city, and from private non-profits. You can read all about that here if you want to learn more.

PEG faces challenges in adopting web-based distribution methods because of some very specific funding stream problems. The federal government requires cable companies to turn over a small percentage of revenue in each municipality (and lately to entire states with statewide franchising agreements) to make television. PEG organizations face risks by entering an internet-based video distribution market with their local content that cable providers and local governments may eliminate their funding streams because they are no longer making television.

With this picture fully painted, this conference workshop highlighted a number of organizations who are experimenting with Drupal as a platform to replace aspects of their television infrastructure. There are a bunch of projects in development around this PEG industry and I wanted to point some of them out.

An immediate need for PEG centers is to take more control over the video hardware they depend on, and shake off the stranglehold that video hardware vendors have had on this entire industry. The trend is to replace these elements with something that is both open and standards compliant. It's a challenge. Hand scheduling 24/7 television programming for 1 to 5 channels on video server systems like Leightronics, Maestrovision, Synergy, Tightrope, Princeton Server Group, to name a few, is cumbersome and it's exacerbated by the lack of integration between all these products and CMSs and other applications.

Emily Frazier in Vermont spoke about her success in building out Drupal-to-video-server integrations for PEG centers. This module is essentially a scheduling vehicle with the ability to sync with an external database - in this early release it would sync with a Maestrovision video server to manage cable channel playback. It hasn't made it far down the development cycle yet, maybe because it's such a specific solution, but it is in a state where another developer can pick it up and roll with it. The module, PEGevent, has a handy demo.

Manhattan Neighborhood Networks in New York, and their partner Open Flows, has also been working on an IRL member management, inventory control, contracting/budgeting, and playback scheduling system. Presumably this is to replace a proprietary database vendor (like Facil, who's sole proprietor/developer attended this workshop with great disdain). The access community heard about this project last year and we got our first look at their really large implementation this month. Unfortunately they haven't released any of the project stack, despite the large community of invested lurkers waiting to contribute.

The last speaker was the access center in Denver, Denver Open Media. They have a different framing, this organization is not a conventional access center since they have no funding from the cable service provider and have different challenges of serving their communities as a result. Together with their partner Drupal developer, Civic Pixel, they are also working on a very large scale customization of Drupal to automate their media ingest, program scheduling, budgeting/contracting, and member management. Denver is also one of the awardees of a $380k Knight News Challenge for what they call Tools for Public Access TV. Their project is an interesting "wikification" of a public access channel. Users of the website can submit video content, edit the television schedule themselves, vote and promote content, and have it reflected on the TV for the whole city. It seems they have written an integration with the Princeton Server Group video server product to do some of this work. Again, we heard about their work last year and now we got to see some of it in action. They also don't have any public releases for the community at large to contribute to yet.

Now is a good time for the PEG community to really meetup with the Drupal community, and vice versa. Its clear that vision, operation and funding are going to fluctuate rapidly for PEG as the end of cable television comes along, and opportunities for local access centers to re-vision themselves as a web-based local service are already popping up. Drupal developers are also landing more contracts, projects and hours working on elements that ultimately support media and democracy.

So, hello PEG, welcome to the Drupal community. We can't wait to see what great things your work with Drupal is going to contribute, both in potential code base and public good.