Welcome to Spencer Cable Access
How Do They Do That?
Town Meetings
Town meetings are covered by SCA in a few different ways. The actual Town Meeting will see one of the station volunteers in the back of the hall with a video camera capturing the event. Generally, everything is videotaped and we try to keep voting somewhat private. By that, we ask our camera operator not to scan the assembled citizens during voting. Otherwise, we're free to show anything and everything.
Select Board Meetings - we have a couple cameras set up in the meeting room and Al Shedyak does the taping and camera work. If Al's not available, someone else fills in for him. It's nice having meetings in one location because we can have a permanent equipment station in the room. In fact, SCA paid for and had built the cabinet for this. It was designed to match the decor of the room as much as possible.
School Committee - three of our volunteers have had responsibility for these meetings: Norm LaLiberte, Denise Lacroix, and Casey Danek. Meetings are held in different locations throughout the School District. Most often, they are in the DPHS Cafeteria, which is nice for us because we can put the equipment on a cart and just roll it across the parking lot. Meetings at other schools require the equipment get loaded into a car; the cart is used here, too. Setup usually means multiple microphones, a sound mixer, video monitor, and single camera. We try to keep cable runs covered or strung out together to minimize the chance of someone tripping over them.
At all the meetings, we record onto VHS tape. We don't make copies. The tapes are taken as they come out of the camera and are placed into playback decks. If more than one tape is used (a tape is usually good for two hours), then two playback decks are loaded. The scheduler hardware can control the decks and, once programmed, the tapes play back into the video feed that goes to the Charter "head end" in Charlton. From there, it comes back into Spencer for viewing by our subscribers. The overall workflow is simple; tape the meeting, load the decks, program the controller. When the meeting playback has run its course (usually a month's worth of playback), the tapes are placed into our tape pool for reuse.
That's about all there is to it.
Next time, we'll talk about other types of shows.
Live Music Benefit For Spencer's Food Pantry
Thanks to the efforts of SCA volunteers, we were able to host a live broadcast of a music concert to benefit Spencer's Feeding Neighbors Food Pantry. The goal was to raise cash and food donations and we had a successful day of it. Proceeds included over $2000 thanks to generous donations from businesses and individuals, and over 2000 pounds of food collected.
Here are some other images from that day...
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Click on any image to view a larger version. |
How To Contact Us
For Bulletin Board Requests
If you have something you'd like announced on our bulletin board, you must submit via postal mail, drop off, or fax. We will no longer accept requests via email.
Requests for the bulletin board should be submitted at least two weeks ahead of time.
Telephone
You can call us at 508-885-7967. Leave a message as we are not always available at the station. Please note that our fax and regular phone numbers are the same.
Postal Address
Spencer Cable Access
310 Main Street
Spencer, MA 01562
...we are located in the small building with the maroon canopy next to the David Prouty High School Cafeteria. (Don't let the 304 on the canopy fool you, our address really is 310.)
Our "Channel Strategy"
We have three access channels on which we feed various video and bulletin board content back to the community. You can learn more about what each one does by clicking the links in the navigation menu above.
- Channel 11 - bulletins
- Channel 12 - new and/or topical programs
- Channel 13 - reruns mostly
Interested In Producing A Show?
Stop in if you're interested in making a new show, Chat with one of our members about how this works. Our Station Manager, Carol McPherson can get you started. Call and leave a message.