I find that I sleep better when I write out a blog post before going to bed. It lets me get some things out that I might not have expressed during the day. That I can express myself more easily in writing compared to doing so verbally is sometimes problematic.

I was very pleased Wednesday to see that Conneaut CAT TV had some content posted that originated from Geneva. That’s a nice expansion for them in terms of territory. Unfortunately Ashtabula City is the central city of the Ashtabula micropolitan area. We don’t really have this town covered yet.

One of the tools that would allow for bootstrapping the Ashtabula video stream would be to use the OBS Virtual Camera to feed into a video conferencing system like Skype, Big Blue Button, or Jitsi. The notion would be to essential have a virtual stage show live. We would circumvent the need for a CDN if we treated the news broadcast as “appointment television” and scheduled it in one of those conferencing systems as if it were a webinar. That way the paradigm would be to do the live webinar first then use the infrastructure already in place at https://coyote.works/ to push the video of the webinar out as a video podcast. The highest possible participant count seems to be with Big Blue Button so I would need to investigate that further.

Would I be happy with how it looked? No, not really. Would it get us on the air? Probably. It would be the way around the real estate problem. It would mean that I couldn’t be in front of the camera as I would have to be on the backend keeping metaphorical plates spinning so that everything worked. That’s why this wouldn’t work as a one-man-show. This would require collaborators to happen.

A tentative list of things requiring news coverage just in and around Ashtabula includes:

  • Ashtabula City Council & other municipal affairs
  • Ashtabula Area City Schools
  • Ship traffic in the Ashtabula Harbor
  • Community events with the churches
  • Community events with the social organizations
  • Crime
  • Finance
  • Medical news with our local hospital, Ashtabula County Medical Center
  • Parks events
  • Business news, including chamber of commerce updates

That’s really quite a bit. The Star Beacon isn’t really covering much of that. People in Greater Cleveland wouldn’t care about any of it if it were cluttering their TV news. Finding a way to cover is essential for improving community cohesion.

If I can get the webinar bit to pull together the next steps would be to start recruiting people and to get a Kickstarter created to raise cash. This isn’t free of cost. There are various hosting providers for Big Blue Button to check as to pricing. There is an entire handbook on how to create a Kickstarter campaign.

Nowhere did I say this would be easy. This is plenty of road still to be traveled.