locals launch online community channel

The concept went from vague idea to reality over the course of a single beer.

Videographer Dan Freund began working several months ago on a series of profiles highlighting Portsmouth’s artists and professionals, but he lacked a forum to share his videos with the community. The city has long been working to establish a public access television station, but that process has dragged on for years. Freund chatted with multi-media guru John Herman over a beer at The Press Room.

“He was kind of bemoaning that Portsmouth doesn’t really have a community access channel yet,” Herman said.

Freund described his vision for an online media venue that would enable him and others to “shine a light on the interesting people from the community, the people that were making a difference, the people that stand out,” Freund said.

As he described the project, Herman buried his face in his laptop and began typing. At first, Freund thought Herman was ignoring him. But soon enough, Herman spun around the screen and displayed what he had created.

“By the end of him describing it, I had made it,” Herman said

What he made was a live community channel on the streaming Internet television platform Livestream. The site is now up at www.shortstream.tv. Freund and Herman view it as the public access channel Portsmouth has been trying in vain to create for the last several years.

“Over the course of a beer, we were able to do something that has taken the city however many years to even get close to,” Freund said. 

Currently, the channel includes a continual loop of short videos, most of them produced by Freund’s company, Kinney Hill Media Partners. There’s a profile of Steve Fowle, editor of the N.H. Gazette, who describes the family legacy behind the nation’s oldest newspaper. There are also profiles of businesses such as the new record, bicycle and clothing store Odyssey & Oracle. Sprinkled between these informative videos are other random clips, such as footage from last year’s Portsmouth Halloween Parade.

But the channel is still in its infancy, and its creators have much bigger plans for the future. In addition to the reel of videos, which Freund plans to update with new material every couple of weeks, they are looking for “vee-jays” interested in hosting live programs. It could be anything from coverage of City Council meetings to coffee shop chats about community issues.

They’re also looking for more video submissions and will consider just about any YouTube clip with some kind of local angle from the Portsmouth area. The pair is open to ideas.

“If it has local places and local faces, we’re interested in seeing it,” Herman said.

Meanwhile, the city is still working toward creating a public access television station.

“We are continuing to move through the process of how to set it up and hope to have some clear progress by the end of the summer,” said John Gregg, chair of the city’s Cable Television and Communications Commission.

Portsmouth already has a government station that broadcasts meetings on Channel 22 (past broadcasts are archived on the city’s Web site). But the Cable Commission negotiated an agreement with Comcast last fall to add two more channels for public access and education. The School Board would operate the education channel, but the commission hopes to establish a non-profit team to run the public access channel. And that’s not a speedy process.

“The issues to be dealt with are setting up a non-profit organization and all the steps that are involved in doing so, filing papers, getting a group of people to be the incorporators, trying to set that up and then establish a board,” Gregg said.

The commission also must figure out how to fund the station. Public access channels in surrounding communities cost between $200,000 and $400,000 per year to operate, including employee salaries, equipment and studio space. But recent advances in technology might enable Portsmouth to lower some of those costs, Gregg said.

The online channel, however, is significantly less expensive, and it offers some features old-fashioned TV cannot match.

“It’s kind of fun, because we’re recreating television except with limitless opportunities that the Internet gives us,” Herman said. The site, he explained, has all the capabilities of television, but also enables viewers to enter live chat rooms during the programs. “The channel has the opportunity for you to look deeper at the people and places around you, and I think that’s cool.”

Herman lives in Newmarket but spends ample time in the Port City. He’s intrigued by the idea of using a relatively new Web application to fulfill a need in the community.

“I’m interested in using Internet technology to give cultural opportunities, basically,” Herman said. “I do a lot of weird, artsy Web projects, but something like this I find, personally, just really exciting.”

For Freund, who has lived in Portsmouth for about eight years, the channel is an opportunity to showcase the city’s rich artistic community, its quirky independent businesses, and its unique position in national politics. He especially looks forward to covering the 2012 presidential primary.

“For a long as I’ve been in New Hampshire, I’ve kind of been eyeing the New Hampshire primary as a golden opportunity for just grabbing a little bit of attention from that international focus that descends here,” he said.

Freund and Herman will spend coming months refining the online channel and figuring out ways to fund it. Herman said they can probably cover the cost of programming with Google ads, or even use product placement from local businesses in various programs.

Community members can submit ideas and proposals by going to www.shortstream.tv and filling out a form on the homepage. Freund hopes people jump at the opportunity to contribute to Portsmouth’s new community TV channel.

“You can do amazing things,” he said. “There’s no reason why we as a community can’t benefit from having access to these tools.”