What Happened to Community TV ?

Geoff Scott the founder, and former executive director, of Tri-Cities Community TV, discusses the history of community TV in the lower mainland.

In the mid 70's Rogers Cable built a vast network of over a dozen neighborhood television programming offices / production studios that provided opportunities for over a thousand volunteers living throughout Vancouver's lower mainland to learn basic production skills and to use those skills to produce programming that benefited the communities in which they lived.

Be it Richmond in Review, Burnaby Edition, or East Side Story, each city in the lowermainlamd had it's own magazine show where new volunteers learned to shoot, edit, and produce their own short stories promoting community groups or events in their region. As volunteers progressed they took on more specialized rolls including sound recording, lighting, or working in front of the camera.

Many of the volunteers who spent time assisting with the production of the magazine shows went on to produce their own programs, and even went on to work in the production industry be it film or television. So what happened to to this amazing network of volunteers and the neighborhood television production offices ?

In a word " Shaw "

When Shaw took over for Rogers in 2000, the first neighborhood television office to be closed was the office located on Kingsway in Port Coquitlam which serviced the Tri-Cities region. At that time volunteers were told that they were still welcome to use the production facilities in Surrey or Burnaby to produce their programming. Over the next two years the remaining production offices were systematically shut down and volunteers were told by Shaw that their services were no longer required.

In 2003 Shaw essentially kicked the community off of the community channel. In their opinion volunteers had become a hinderance to their own little channel that began to look more and more like any other commercial channel and no longer provided any real service to the community. Programming on Shaw such as Urban Rush or Daytime promoted the beauty industry, fashion industry, restaurateurs, real estate, legal services, etc.

It was at this time that volunteers with the former Rogers Van East programming office formed Independent Community Television ( ICTV ). Mr. Scott served on the board of ICTV for five years before moving on to form Tri-Cities Community TV ( TCCTV ).