“How many viewers do you have?
It’s a question I hear from time to time when seeking North TV underwriting from local businesses. It’s a question without an answer.
While the number of viewers are released the day after the NFL’s Super Bowl (New England’s win over Seattle in 2015 is the record with 114.4 million people), cable access stations do not have access to information for our channels.
Although those numbers aren’t available, I would bet my house that The Century Game on Saturday between Attleboro and North Attleboro was the most watched program in this area since local cable started nearly 40 years ago.
It is why I’m so proud of the professionals I had the privilege to work with on Saturday. A staff of five with seven contract laborers produced a product on par with any game you’d see on NESN or NBC Sports Boston.
Those networks and the hundreds of cable stations and streaming services we are often compared with have budgets in the millions. The revenue local cable receives is a slight fraction of that amount and is shrinking every year.
To make matters worse, the major cable companies that carry our products — even though we provide programming only they can deliver — relegate us to standard definition channels.
Investments in Hi-Def equipment, however, has made a noticeable difference in the picture quality of the programs we produce.
Although that equipment was in use on Saturday, there was still no guarantee the game would be available when viewers turned on the televisions.
A broadcast station would have televised the game with a satellite truck transmitting back to their studio; we were forced to use a small device that streams the signal through an ethernet cable or cellular device.
Ethernet is obviously the most reliable. We use it to stream two of our channels to Plainville cable subscribers 24/7. We rarely (once or twice a year) have an issue.
It was why I was excited when I remembered the press box at Community Field had an active cable television outlet courtesy of North Attleboro Junior Football. I wondered if it was possible to add internet service.
I reached out to NAJF officials and they were kind enough to allow me to contact Comcast to add a modem and internet to their account. North TV would then reimburse the league for the extra cost.
If only it were that simple. I was all set to have to commit to the highest upload speed Comcast provides when I heard the woman on the other end of the phone read a statement saying I was agreeing to a two-year contract that would eventually cost over $6,000.
When I explained the modem and internet was for a once-in-a-lifetime local event and needed only because of COVID, she explained that we could cancel the service after the game and simply pay the termination fee.
There was a catch, however.
The fee would be 75% of the monthly cost for every month remaining on the two-year contract. The result would have required North TV to pay $37 a minute for the time we actually used the service; a cost of more than $5 thousand.
I appealed to town officials in hopes they would have better success reaching out to their liaisons at Comcast and Verizon. They were also unsuccessful.
The North Attleboro school system, which pays thousands of dollars a month for internet to the town’s schools, offered to reach out to their contacts. The answer was, once again, no.
We had no choice but to rely on Verizon Wireless. There has only been one time the technology failed and that was during the live debate between the 18 North Attleboro town council candidates in June 2019.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I woke up every night last week knowing there was nothing we could do if we experienced a poor cell signal on Saturday.
The stress aged us all a couple of years and to think we get to do it all over again seven months from yesterday — Thanksgiving Day on Nov. 25.
