Meagan Redman-Gomez and Ricardo Gomez were among many who pitched in.
Thanks to the volunteer labor of locals, Saugerties’ Community Access TV’s studio will be ready to go “full digital,” using new equipment that will be installed within the next two weeks.
“We are rebuilding the playout room, which plays out the videos to [cable TV provider] Spectrum,” said chief engineer Nigel Redman, who oversaw the initial construction of the station in 2005. “It was built many years ago, and now we’re going all digital. It’s been my plan since 2016 and now we finally get to do it. This weekend it came together — even my daughter and her husband came up from New York and we got one third of it done.”
Among other volunteers, Bob Daly, Paul O’Malley and Matt Phillips of Saugerties donated their time on the weekend of Jan. 27. Saugerties High graduate Meagan Redman-Gomez, now a producer of ABC’s Nightline, and her husband Ricardo Gomez, a senior audio engineer at NBC, lent their expertise to the crew.
Currently, the station streams TV 23 programming 24/7 at www.lighthousetv.peg.tv using a Telecaster server; in a month, the station will switch to a Hypercaster server, which will allow the storage of footage onsite and onsite streaming without using “the cloud.” Previously, the equipment available in the playout room included a DVD player and an “in-house bulletin board”— now, the room connects to Spectrum directly via a fiber-optic link.
“A lot of people don’t realize that the TV station exists — we’d like to get some awareness,” said Redman. “The public is welcome to use it, too — all they need is a plan. We have training classes every year, they can rent the equipment free of charge. It’s one of the best in the country.”
Saugerties residents with ideas for shows can email lighthousetv@saugerties.ny.us.
Kingston, NY has the same equipment since the 1990s. And a lot got auctioned off.. it’s only on the air because of the Town of Esopus., Which is ran by one volunteer doing awesome job.