FREE PUBLIC ACCESS TV workshop comes to Orlando

Hi! I'm Bobby Mariano from the Alternate Media Center in New York City and I've come down to Orlando to help co-ordinate the first free video workshop in this community. I want to invite any individual or group in the community to come around and learn how to use ½” portable, easy to operate video equipment. After two classes, one for instruction on how to use the equipment, and a second for practice, you may borrow the equipment from the workshop, tape anything that you’d like, and put that tape on the free public access time slot on cable TV.

Orange Cablevision has purchased two portable video tape recorders, capable of synchronous sound and image, three editing decks, a supply of tape and three monitors for our use. They will be available on a first come basis. Once you have learned about the equipment, your name will be entered on a public list, assuring you access to equipment as it becomes available.

The Alternate Media Center, of which I’m a staff member, is working under a grant from the John and Mary Markle Foundation to attempt to find out how people can have access to media. We have been working with different cable companies around the country over the last year who have purchased portable video tape recorders and made them available to their community free of charge. These experimental projects are now going on in New York City, Reading, Pa., Cape May, N.J., and Bakersfield Calif.

However, each community is unique and now Orlando may develop for itself a community programmed and controlled TV channel.

WHY CABLE?

Cable is the best technology we have so far for making this possible because of its multiplicity of channels. Orlando will soon have up to 20 channels, and has the capacity for 40!

WHY PORTABLE VTR’S?

One-half inch video tape recorders are the most inexpensive image making machines ever devised by our species. Because the process is electronic and not chemical as in film you can re-cycle the tape by recording over it. The same as you would with an audio tape recorder.

WHAT IS IN IT FOR ORANGE CATV?

An opportunity to sell to the community the cable as the last great communications system of the 20th century. Besides, this company happens to believe in the concept of public access.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE ALTERNATE MEDIA CENTER T NYU?

The opportunity to work in real situations with real human beings to help develop a healthy communications system that may provide us with the information that we will need to survive. Cable is the only technology that can allow us the luxury and necessity for comprehensive feedback. We must learn ro use it, otherwise it will use us as television had done.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR PARTICIPANTS OF THE WORKSHOP AS WELL AS THE COMMUNITY AT LARGE?

The opportunity to use the most powerful medium of our generation to personally, honestly, directly communicate whatever you should like to your community (regardless of its size) without mediators, experts or censorship.

This may all sound weird but you can check it out by calling me to be scheduled for a class at 422-3111 !!!

Hope to see you soon.

Bobby