Can you hear me now?
Let’s assume you’ve got nothing better to do on any given evening and you’re just hankering for some hot, local political or public policy action. You might tune into the county’s government affairs channel, right?
And if you have done that been recently, it’s likely you’ve either turned it off in frustration or become an expert in lip reading. The audio quality of the broadcasts makes councilmen and Planning Board members sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
In Baltimore County, the government programming runs on Channel 25 on both Comcast and Verizon FiOS. If you don’t have the times and days of your favorite shows memorized, you can find a guide here.
While all the complaints I’ve received have come from Comcast customers, it’s not the cable giant’s fault. It’s likely that you FiOS customers out there also are experiencing difficulties.
The council approved Verizon’s cable franchise about 16 months ago. As part of the franchise, the company was obligated to also carry the county’s government channel. Comcast is responsible for the taping of council and Planning Board meetings and other shows such as “Police Report” and “Hello Baltimore County.”
Having Comcast make copies and deliver them to Verizon presented its own set of logistical issues. So, the county decided to take the taped programs and broadcast them from the county schools system’s Education Channel studio at Carver High School in Towson.
And that’s the likely origin of the technical glitch that is the cause of the audio distortion, according to Thomas Peddicord, the council’s legal adviser.
The council is the regulating body for cable service in the county.
County officials and technicians at the Education Channel are now aware of the problem and working to correct it, Peddicord said on July 24.
Whatever the exact problem was, it appeared to be fixed this morning. The sound on a few programs checked at random contained no distortions.