Spectrum will exile Olelo channels

What if you got in your car and drove to your favorite public park to meet someone, play or hang out — and the park was no longer there, paved over or worse yet, replaced with a shoddy building? How would you feel?

If Charter Communications, the much-reviled parent of Spectrum Cable has its way, on Feb. 6 when you turn on your TV to visit your local electronic park, Olelo, it won’t be there. Olelo’s channels will be buried in an electronic graveyard known as digital Siberia somewhere up in the 180s in the cable boondocks where nobody goes, in low definition.

In an outrageous channel-slamming move that will effectively make local, public, noncommercial community television channels hard to watch and hard to find, Spectrum Cable has announced that it is moving Olelo from its current high-traffic locations to what are essentially vacant slots. What this means is that you will turn to Channels 49, 53, 54 and 55 to get reliable neighborhood-centric 2018 election coverage, and you will not be able to find it.

Research has proven that when channels are relocated like this in the absence of a well-funded comprehensive re-branding campaign, a significant audience is lost forever.

What Spectrum is doing defeats the purpose of why these noncommercial access channels were established to begin with. They were set up for no other purpose but to create access to cable television studios for people who would otherwise not have a voice and to encourage civic engagement by televising issues of public importance, providing in-depth coverage of government meetings and making govern- ment more accessible to the masses.

Slamming these channels into the digital 180s might cause them to disappear from the newspaper TV grid and force subscribers to pay for special equipment to view. If this happens, fundamental access to government will be curtailed. In this important election year, candidates themselves will have their free speech diminished and civic groups using these channels might as well talk to tumbleweeds and crickets.

To add insult to injury, Charter — which is arguably the worst cable operator in the nation — is refusing to transmit local community access channels in high definition (HD) on a par with local broadcast stations like PBS. It is thumbing its nose at state regulation and stifling your voice.

Spectrum is so confident that the cable division in state government won’t do anything about it they are bound and determined to do it anyway.

Maui, Big Island and Kauai are next, but there is a remedy. Gov. David Ige’s Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs (DCCA) could enforce its own rulings that cable access channels be available to all subscribers, revisit its deplorable 2012 corporate giveaway of public electromagnetic real estate and make sure Olelo’s community channels stay right where they are.

DCCA needs to grow a spine and seriously consider denying Charter’s pending franchise renewal applications on Maui and Kauai based on well-documented character issues. Maybe then this mainland media conglomerate bully will come to the table. If DCCA pays attention to the abuses inflicted upon cable subscribers throughout the United States, it is evident beyond a doubt that Charter is unfit to operate in Hawaii. To do anything less would be a betrayal of a public trust.

Jay April is president and CEO of Akaku Maui Community Television, sister stations of Olelo serving 53,000 cable subscribers in Maui County.