City Lights

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Blue CornerYou’ve decided to take a drive around the city at night and you notice these very nice colorful lights at the corner of State and Main. You wonder, what is that place?

That is the beautiful lights emanating from Focus Springfield Community TV.
The lights serve for three purposes:

  • Uplifts Downtown Springfield at night
  • Provides much needed illumination for late night walks
  • And lets face it, to attract the public to the station!

If you want to check us out, come by the station during the day. In case you don’t know exactly what Focus Springfield is and who we are, you can go to the About Us page here to find out more.

The Parking Question

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We’d like to apologize for the condition of parking downtown at the station. When we moved in a couple years back, it wasn’t great, but the casino construction has made it even tougher on all of us. As staff, we’ve found pretty good luck on Court Street outside City Hall (2-hour meters) and in a couple lots down on and around Union Street (you have to pay $3-5 at most of these, but you never have to refill a meter).

If you’re willing to hike a little bit further, you can always park all day for $.50 (!?) at a monitored lot located at 110 Maple Street. It’s about five blocks away, and takes a little over five minutes to walk. You need two quarters specifically to park here.

Again, we’re sorry about the parking hassle and wish there was something we could do. Have you found a better, cheaper, or more convenient parking place? Let us know so we can pass it along to the rest of our producers, volunteers, staff, and interns!

A Long Trip

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sportFocus Springfield has been working hard lately to improve the quality of our broadcasts. When most people think of television, they think of cameras and microphones; few people think of all the other controls, equipment, and software that go into a production. But, have you ever thought about what happens to a program once it’s complete and ready to air?!!!

For every program that is created down here at Focus, we have to upload a file for broadcast, transcode it multiple times into a format that your cable box can play, and send this new file all the way to Comcast’s home base in Chelmsford, MA. After that, this file is then sent from Chelmsford back to your TV.

At and between all these different points, there are dozens of connections. Today, we went through all these connection points with a Comcast video engineer and the independent contractor we work with in order to ensure we’re getting the best video and audio signal possible to the homes of our viewers. We found a couple trouble points and were able to increase the quality of future broadcasts. Television is always evolving and is eternally a work in progress, and we are doing our best to stay on the forefront of broadcast technology.