According to Everett Communications Director Alyson Dell Isola, ECTVonline.com programming has been suspended because of a crash of the cable access channel’s broadcasting server.
The $13,000 piece of computer equipment recently crashed, leaving the station with no way to store or broadcast its various program offerings when there is no one at the station and no way to “push out” programming via the popular website ectvonline.com.
“In layman’s terms, every show we air is now recorded and saved as a digital file,” explained Dell Isola. “There are no more DVDs or tapes or anything like that, and all of those digital files have to be stored somewhere in order to be broadcast out.”
The storage space for the station’s programming is the larger server that was custom built for ECTV by Tightrope Media Systems of Minnesota. When the station’s old server crashed, a little more than a week ago, the station had to specially order a new one to be built, that process take two to three weeks and once it is received it could take at least another week to get the new server installed and operational.
“In the meantime, we do have the ability to broadcast meetings, etc live and we can manually broadcast some shows during operating hours, as long as we have staff on hand to do that,” said Dell Isola. “Unfortunately, we have limited capacity to do that, so right now we’ve been prioritizing the various Council and committee meetings for broadcast. Many of the more than 30 shows we receive per week are not able to be broadcast at this time.”
The good news for fans of the station and its broadcasting is that once the new server is up and running, the staff will be able to load all of the shows and meetings that have been coming in since the server went down, and it will all be available for download from the website at that time.
“It’s inconvenient right now, but the good news is that we’ll still have everything and we’ll be able to upload all of that material later on,” said Dell Isola.