New PBS station has O.C. flair

KOCE-TV introduced the OC Channel to the media Wednesday, a new PBS station that will offer full-time news and lifestyle coverage targeted to Orange County residents.

The OC Channel will begin airing programs Oct. 24. KOCE has teamed up with Cox Communications, Chapman University, the Orange County Register, Time Warner Cable, Caltrans, UC Irvine and the Orange County Department of Education to produce and bring programming to the channel.

“We have felt for years Orange County is underserved by the broadcasters. Orange County has a lot to offer and a lot going on,” said Bridget Kelly, executive producer of Cox Communications Channel 3.

Cox Communications will be the first to carry the OC Channel. Cox serves about 245,000 subscribers in south Orange County and another 30,000 in Palos Verdes and San Pedro, Kelly said. KOCE and Time Warner Cable have not set a date to carry the channel, KOCE president Mel Rogers said. The Orange County Register will provide a 24-hour headline news crawl across the bottom half of the screen and Caltrans (the California Department of Transportation) will offer views from live traffic cameras across the county.

Chapman University is lending its young filmmakers and production resources along with Orange County-related features from the university’s film school, Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. UCI is supplying coverage of sporting events, performances and lectures. The county’s education department is also producing educational content. KOCE and Cox will both carry over some of their locally produced shows to the OC Channel.

A $200,000 Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant is helping to make the OC Channel possible. KOCE was one of 27 stations vying for money, and the new channel will serve as a model for other PBS stations across the country.

“[This is] not just news, not just repeating news features. But doing shows on the health, economic, environmental scenes and the arts,” said Chapman University President Jim Doti.

The last time Orange County had a channel dedicated to local issues was the Orange County Newschannel (OCN), which lasted 10 years. Unlike OCN, which was shut down by Adelphia’s Southern California division in 2001, the OC Channel is a nonprofit public broadcasting station.

OCN was also almost solely dependent on advertising revenues and was a perennial money drain for Adelphia and its founders, the OC Register.

“OCN was a commercial channel and had to make profits for investors. This is a noncommercial channel. It just needs to break even to survive,” Brooks said. “This does not have the kind of overhead OCN has because we don’t have dozens of news vans running around.”

“Orange County is a unique entity,” Doti said. “KOCE is small enough to provide personalized content. Bigger is not always better.”