TCI drops cable connections for the KCAT live broadcast

By Jeff Kearns

Anyone who tried to tune to the live broadcast of Los Gatos High School's graduation on KCAT (Channel 6 on Los Gatos cable) June 11 was in for a little surprise: a message that, due to technical difficulties, there wouldn't be any live broadcast.

According to station manager George Sampson, TCI dropped the connections in several cable boxes on the campus that he'd planned to use for the live broadcast without alerting him. So when a KCAT engineer called TCI to request that the link be activated for the graduation, he was informed that the links hadn't been active for three months.

A spokesperson for TCI, however, insists that the town was informed about the service changes months ago.

Sampson said he and his engineers tried to patch through to the KCAT studio--which is located on the LGHS campus--but that he didn't have enough time or money to throw together a new connection that week.

Sampson said he had a half-dozen angry messages on the KCAT machine as soon as he got back to the studio after the graduation, and several more that filtered in after that.

"We don't want people to think that this is KCAT's decision not to broadcast the graduation. This is a small town and people really care about this," Sampson says. "We were prepared to and wanted to, but we couldn't because TCI had deactivated the cable drops without ever notifying us."

Sampson says it's not the first time TCI's kept him in the dark, and that he plans to fire off a letter to TCI's area manager.

TCI spokesperson Andrew Johnson says that the service at the drop boxes was changed to accommodate cable modem service by @Home, which the cable company started carrying in February, and that KCAT was notified back in November that it wouldn't be able to do a live broadcast of the Christmas parade.

Johnson said he didn't know who was notified or when, but he's sure that somebody must have been told. "There must have been a breakdown in the communication process among the folks there," he said. "Somebody at the city was certainly aware of it."

KCAT has been rebroadcasting the graduation, which runs just over one hour, and will continue running it in the next couple weeks. It will run June 23 and 24 at 8 p.m., and June 26 and 27 at noon. KCAT is also selling tapes of the graduation for $25. Call 395-5228 for more information.

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