July 13, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Downtown Community Television Center, a community-media organization in New York, has built a television studio that is designed to broadcast live, interactive television programs simultaneously on cable and the Internet.
Staff members from DCTV, as the center is known, taught a group of teenagers who are homeless how to produce video programs. The first show scheduled for broadcast will feature the students discussing their projects, which will focus on what it’s like to live in a homeless shelter.
The show will appear on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the public-access division of one of the local cable systems, which reaches 500,000 homes, as well as on the Internet. People who are watching will be able to respond to the program, as it is being broadcast, by using a Webcam — a video camera connected to a computer with access to the Internet. DCTV, in turn, will be able to insert the responses they receive into the live broadcast. Viewers will see the comments as a small picture superimposed on their screens.
DCTV plans to install Webcams in the two shelters where the young people live so that other residents can participate in the broadcast.
Jon Alpert, co-director of the center, says that the format “almost follows the model of talk radio.”
In addition to similar shows by participants in its video-production programs for high-school students and people with disabilities, DCTV is also working with the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to develop cultural programming.
Mr. Alpert envisions interactive master classes that would be broadcast into schools. During a televised dance class, for example, students would be able to submit via Webcam a videotaped performance for the instructor to evaluate.
Much of the support — in the form of both cash and in-kind gifts — to build the new studio, which cost about $350,000, came from technology companies.
For more information: Go to http://www.dctvny.org.
