Bourne TV Getting Much-Needed Upgrades
Big changes are coming to Bourne Community Television. While the changes will not be big in scope—in fact, it’s an acutely small project—they will certainly be big in terms of efficacy and benefit to the community.
Jennifer McGrail, creative director and director of operations at BTV, spoke to the Enterprise ahead of work that is ongoing in the station’s area of the Bourne Veterans Memorial Community Center. While the operating space BTV had worked fine in the past, Ms. McGrail said the station’s operations have simply outgrown the space, which she quipped is akin to Harry Potter’s under-the-stairs bedroom.
“It’s basically a closet,” she said. “I’m not even kidding; it’s a very, very small space.”
The limited wiggle room for BTV’s three-person team makes the job more difficult, Ms. McGrail said. As public demands for access have increased and been further compounded following the pandemic, it has become too hectic to simultaneously monitor and correct audio signals for multiple speakers, switch between cameras on the fly, and keep tabs on the station’s multiple live signals in a closet-sized space that is literally labeled with a “storage” placard.
To add to that, Ms. McGrail said the closet is inside a room at the community center that is often booked for meetings or activities, making it difficult to go in and out or work on equipment.
But all of that is about to change. With support from the town’s cable advisory committee, BTV was able to secure additional funding from Comcast upon renewal of its 10-year contract, which will allow for various and much-needed upgrades to both the station’s physical space and its equipment. After working with recreation director Krissanne Caron and Town Administrator Marlene V. McCollem, BTV got the go-ahead to expand its space and bring its vision to fruition.
“Hopefully within the next couple of weeks, the expansion will be done,” Ms. McGrail said. “As far as the equipment goes, once that expansion is done, then I can start purchasing new equipment and getting that installed. So within the next couple of months, we’ll have some of those major technology upgrades at the community center done.”
Those technology upgrades are a big piece of the puzzle. Between the degradation of equipment due to flooding at the community center in January 2018 and the pandemic-era push for live streaming and remote access to programming, BTV was struggling to keep up with the community’s demand.
“We have a real need,” Ms. McGrail said, “especially because the community demands a lot—which is fine, we love it; we love serving the community, we love that we have three channels that are very diverse and that we can do that—but we’re a very small staff…it was just a lot, so we needed that extra funding to update this equipment and just make it a lot easier to better serve everybody.”
To break it down, BTV’s main hub is at Bourne High School, from which all three channels—13, 14 and 15—go live. The signal from the community center, however, isn’t connected to this system because there is no fiber running through the canal to connect the two.
“The community center is able to go live on TV because it overrides our main studio signal,” Ms. McGrail said, explaining that that part is handled on Comcast’s end as soon as BTV flips a switch. BTV did some “crazy workaround stuff” to make the signal work between the main station and the server for live streaming meetings and, although it works, it could be better.
“Of course with COVID, everybody switching to hybrid meetings and really enjoying the ability to access these meetings in those ways, it’s just more and more necessary to be able to do that and provide that service,” Ms. McGrail said.
The server and transmitter equipment that BTV uses at the community center are, frankly, out of date, Ms. McGrail explained, and upgrading them with new equipment will improve the building’s connection, signal and the overall quality of the streams. BTV has also added closed captioning to its programming, but the hitch was that the station’s decades-old modulators do not allow closed captions to pass through to the on-air stream. Comcast will be delivering new equipment to fix that problem, Ms. McGrail said, which will be another benefit to the community. There is also an HD channel in the works.
“We film and record and do everything in HD,” Ms. McGrail said, “so it’s the highest quality that we can send out, we just need Comcast’s new equipment and upgrades to allow it to actually look that way on air.”
For now, BTV’s team certainly has enough going on to keep them busy. The upgrades are exciting, Ms. McGrail said, and she and her team look forward to continuing to serve the community to the best of their ability—and upgrading their space from a storage closet is a huge bonus.
“It’s kind of going with the changes that come around town and just growing with what the community is seeking,” she said. “We do our best for a little but mighty station.”