(upbeat music)
In the beginning, the Seattle Channel
was known as Seattle Municipal Cable TV 28.
Run by the Seattle Public Library,
its placement in the cable menu
made it hard to find.
- People kind of think of you
as this government channel
in the twenty’s
and just skip
right over you.
In theory, when you're not grouped right next
to the commercial stations,
you probably don't
get as many viewers as people are
channel surfing.
Channel 28 was not ideal,
but it's what we got
and it was kind of hard to negotiate
a change.
Hard to find and hard to watch,
as the programming at the time was
a little dry.
Can you hear me now? Yeah.
Okay.
Basically, it was uh, meetings.
Just about all meetings.
Just covering a meeting
was almost
felt like punishment for some people.
The Council would come to order.
There was a guy named Peter Watson
and he would go up
to the council meetings
and record them all by himself
and play them back on a very boring
municipal cable channel.
Just very rudimentary programming
about anything .
I mean, it was just so basic
that there wasn't much information
going out.
A lot of people like to recycle.
We're going to be doing
a main flushing here.
I guess that’s about it then...
Hard to find, hard to watch and well,
a hard place to work.
Located in the municipal building,
the equipment was outdated
and the facilities lacking.
The basement
in the municipal building was...
...a dungeon like basement.
I think we had ten feet of space
and maybe 20 lengthwise.
We would go upstairs to the lobby
and just pick up a couple
like fake plants
and just put them behind the chairs.
I mean, we were dealing with this
rudimentary studio.
Truly a basement.
You didn't really feel great
about where you were
and what you're doing.
A shift came in 1997
and it started with a name change.
Seattle Municipal Cable
Channel 28 became TV SEA.
I think I picked TV SEA
I thought that was really clever.
As in TV S-E-A, for Seattle.
And nobody can figure that out.
You're seeing the City of Seattle.
We're on the sea,
at least on the sound and and sea TV.
But people obviously thought
it was a maritime channel.
All kidding
aside, TV SEA’s programming was no joke.
Is that fair criticism?
No, I don't think it's fair criticism
Because?
It showed more content,
more meetings
and much more
locally produced programming.
I think the bread
and butter of it was meetings
and then we started to expand like
what else can we do
that would be interesting to viewers?
This is the story of the first
black woman elevator inspector.
Most of the Denny party
relocated to the eastern
shores of Elliott Bay
the following spring. For History Link,
I’m Walt Crowley with special
thanks to TV SEA.
To the mayor and the City Council’s credit,
I feel like they left me alone.
In addition to the meetings,
we could do pretty much anything else
that had some kind of
tangential relationship
to the city's mandates.
The only time they got upset,
I think, was really during the WTO riots.
My first day...
(crowd chanting)
So I started at
TV SEA on November 30th, 1999,
the riots broke out that day.
I was like,
Can you get your camera and document
the WTO riots? It's like, What?
“This is what democracy looks like...”
I'm getting tear gassed.
That's my first day on the job
and it's like: Ralph, welcome to TV SEA.
We came back to the station
and we aired all the footage that we took
as if it were a meeting
because we thought it was so momentous.
Not editorializing it.
Just uh,
here's what we saw today.
“The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching...”
The riots gave the world
its first real chance to watch TV SEA.
The next one came about a year later.
The American Diabetes Association
I was switching the cameras
for the city council meeting
and it was like, hey,
it looks like the cameras
are shaking up there
and the council members
are diving under the table.
At that point was like, what is this?
And it turns out to be the
Nisqually earthquake.
I didn't even think it was an earthquake.
I thought they were just
doing some blasting
for the new municipal building.
And we had city council members
saying, “This meetings adjourned!”
Meetings adjourned.
Are you adjourning the meeting, Heidi?
Yes, it's adjourned.
Peters adjourned it.
Peter’s adjourned the meeting.”
Thank you.
Ralph had the good idea
of duplicating the footage
and taking it to all the stations,
and it aired all across the world.
Despite the attention, city leadership
thought the channel was underutilized
and wanted even more citizen engagement,
especially from an untapped Internet
audience.
Mayor Paul Schell and Council member Jim
Compton formed a commission,
and six months
later, the next mayor, Greg
Nickels, made an announcement.
This fall, we're going to combine
television and Web
programming and launch an
MSNBC style service.
You're watching the Seattle Channel.
That service became the Seattle Channel,
which included a revamped website.
Once we got the site up and operating
and there were videos out
that people could access
and like a million page views a month.
Okay, we're on to something here.
As soon as things were available online,
you know, the streaming piece of it...
that is where people
really started to tap in
and see the stuff that we were doing.
That stuff
became the foundation of Seattle Channel’s
programming.
Shows like City of Go-Go,
which would eventually become ArtZone.
There's a lot of things
that matter in this city,
and certainly
one of them is art and culture.
And the Seattle Channel
has never wavered in that support.
City Inside Out launched that same year.
- Welcome to City Inside Out your place for news...
We had politicians
who kept wanting to be on our program.
The claim now is it's
too many rubber stampers.
I don't think that's true.
The monorail authority is a public
body has to be responsible
to the larger public.
The best thing for a politician
is to be in a debate and nail it.
And so our program
ended up being the kind of forum
that you could go on.
And if you were good at
that, hit a home run.
Hello, I'm Mike James.
Welcome to CityStream.
This is our first program,
so let's take a moment
to talk about what we are.
CityStream made its debut in 2003.
We've got the city, you've got the arts.
You have feature stories.
It's Tasha and Joey, the incredible
tree climbing dogs.
Lighter, newsy kind of things.
And Book Lust took off in 2004.
They were trying to do more arts
on the channel.
And I thought, oh,
my gosh!
Seattle's a town of readers.
And so doing something
that was connected to the library
just seemed like a natural thing.
It's difficult to write.
Oh, yes.
She wasn't just your
ordinary librarian.
She had her own action figure doll.
These are old shows.
I did.
You probably don't even have tapes
anymore, do you?
This little engine that could, you know,
still in the basement of City Hall.
But it's impressive what the channel did
early on, what the channel still does.
That was our backdrop.
I’m proud of that backdrop.
Over the years,
Seattle Channel
became a window into government
and a voice
for the region, ready for whatever
the future may bring.
My hairstyle has changed.
My skin has changed.
I've aged.
It's the most amazing gift
that I have been given. I'm a lucky cat.
We all thought we were building
something.
I did the best work of my career,
actually, at the Seattle Channel
because we were given sufficient
time to do it.
You know,
we had the support to do our best work.
I loved it.
I love I love the work.
And and I'm glad
that I only flourished more.
It was just exciting to start in
on some new things
and work together to to build something
we were all proud of.
It was a great thing to lift
what had been seen
as something
that people would never pay attention
to and lift it up
into the public consciousness
and make it a useful tool for citizens.