Lanesville, N.Y., a village of about 100 houses just t'other side of Hunter Mountain in the Catskills, was getting mighty poor TV reception back in 1971, when a bunch of counter-culture types calling themselves the Media Bus, Inc., came up from New York City and leased an old clapboard house at one end of town.

The communal living style of these newcomers didn't sit so well with the townsfolk, but relations improved a little bit the next spring when the city people set up a small transmitting antenna atop their house and started broadcasting news and local events, as well as tapes by video artists and even some drama and comedy shows produced especially for the Lanesville community. The low-band, flea-power very high frequency used by the new Station was susceptible to interference, particularly from car ignitions, but it still delivered the best reception the town ever had.

A local bar owner is reported to have called the service “something extounding’ and agreed to tune in the shows regularly on the set above the bar.

The nonprofit station, supported largely by grant money, served the little community for five years before folding its antenna and moving on. Parry Teasdale, one of the guiding spirits of the Lanesville experiment, believes that it was “the first originating low-power station in the United States.” No one has been found to contradict him.

The key word here is “originating.” As long ago as 1948, a TV booster system was installed in Oregon to amplify and retransmit station signals that were getting lost in the hills. The idea caught on, and soon boosters and later “translators” (which change the frequency of the original signal before rebroadcasting it) were extending television service to hundreds of communities that had never had it before. These low-power stations could reach, on the average, from 10 to 15 miles on their allotment of 10 watts or less for VHF signals and one kilowatt for UHF. To avoid competition with full-power stations, the translators were usually not permitted to produce their own programs.

The Lanesville station did originate its own shows and was therefore blatantly illegal. That is no doubt why Parry Teasdale, its most visible spokesman, came to be known around the FCC as “the Willie Sutton of low-power television.” Fortunately for him, the FCC didn’t know about Lanesville until the experiment had passed into the footnotes of the history of broadcasting.

But if the Lanesville project is a thing of the past, the concept of “neighborhood TV” generated by low-power “ministations” is very much in the present and has been making headlines in broadcast journals around the country. Drawing on the expertise of “outlaw” Teasdale and others, the FCC has produced a hefty report that recommends opening up the whole area of penny-whistle TV to almost anyone who wants to get into it.

Lanesville proved that almost anybody can. By using some secondhand equipment and by settling for a less-thanperfect signal, Teasdale’s marauders managed to get their station on the air for under $1500. No one can expect to do it for that price nowadays. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) estimates the cost of a small low-power station with no local origination to be about $38,000, and the cost of a low-power station with full capabilities for local origination to be about $290,000. In both cases that includes the cost of a satellite earth station.

Not many of us carry that kind of money around in our pockets, but when you consider that a full-power broadcast station costs some $2 million, low power begins to seem like a bargain.

In giving its tentative approval to lowpower stations, the FCC had in mind opening up as many as a thousand frequencies to minorities and noncommercial broadcasters—to those, in other words, who for the most part had been priced out of the full-power market. This would be low power to the people, a belated democratization of the airwaves.

It was a beautiful dream. The trouble is that for every minority or nonprofit applicant dreaming of bringing service to underserved constituencies, there are at least as many applicants from the corporate sector dreaming of making a killing.

At last count, the newly formed Neighborhood TV Co., backed by Allstate, which is itself a subsidiary of Sears, has put in for more than 140 low-power stations. Graphic Scanning Corp. has put in for a good hundred, and even Ted Turner’s cable empire has made application for several dozen. The FCC’s proposed rules would prohibit the three major networks from gobbling up low-power stations like a plate of hors d’oeuvres, but it doesn't prohibit full-power broadcast stations and even cable operators from owning them— in fact from owning any number of them— so long as the stations fall outside their current service area.

All of this makes smoke rise from the custom-made-shirt collar of Rene Anselmo, president of the National Spanish Television Network and one of the pioneers in the low-power movement. His initial low-power requests, back in 1977, applied a bright spur to the flanks of the FCC and forced it to address the lowpower question. A year ago, the FCC at last gave him the go-ahead, and he now has two experimental low-power stations in operation. The one in Washington, D.C., beams Spanish-language programs to the Adams-Morgan area where 14,000 of the city’s 200,000 Hispanics live. The signal is very fuzzy except right in that area, but that is what low power is about: a weak signal, a specific audience.

Since last September, the FCC has been deluged with nearly 5000 low-power applications, only a minority of which are from minorities. The race is going to the quick and the rich and the corporate. “The original concept is being totally subverted,” says Anselmo with more than a touch of anger. He recalis the long wait for FCC approval of his original application. “Everyone was watching this first application,” he says. “If it was granted, they all were going to jump in. It was principally the religious hucksters looking for a quick way to spread God's word. We'd heard, via the grapevine, that one group had contemplated buying in for 500 stations!”

He doesn't think cable operators, who may already have 70 channels at their disposal, should be allowed to muscle into the low-power market, or that the new stations should be turned into subscription-TV operations, as many of them will be. He and others, notably the CPB, not long ago called for a freeze on mass filings until minority and local groups and slow-moving nonprofit organizations can get their acts together.

The FCC first responded to this pressure by deciding, in January, to limit interim construction grants to 15 per applicant. That decision, which seemed to satisfy no one, reduced the danger of immediate corporate takeover of LPTV, but did not eliminate it.

Another big squabble has been over the cutoff date for the filing of applications. The National Association of Broadcasters petitioned the FCC to have the date extended beyond Jan. 16 of this year. According to Michael Couzens, architect of the FCC's interim rulings and, until his recent resignation, head of its low-power project, the FCC “caved in,” agreed to extend the filing deadline to Feb. 17 and promptly got sued by those whose applications were already in. They didn't want the date extended because that might mean competing applications for the same frequencies. An immediate goahead to construct low-power stations can be given only to those who are not competing for a given frequency. Any contested frequencies are put on indefinite hold.

What this means is that if you want to block someone from getting into low power, all you have to do is apply for the same frequency--even if you have no intention of getting into the field yourself. That’s what Booker Wade thinks has been happening with several of the frequencies his all-black Community Television Network has applied for. “Since in each of these cases there were other available channels," he says, “one can only ask why they would file against us if not to stop us.”

No one will admit to any but the most honorable intentions, of course. The NAB, according to Valerie Schulte of its legal department, “is not opposed to low power.” The association merely objects to certain of the FCC’s procedures and to the exclusion of the networks and those broadcasters who'd like to have lowpower operations within their current service areas. “If Sears can come in and put up a 120-station network,” Schulte says, “why can't a little radio station in the Midwest put up a low-power station?”

All this reasonable rhetoric leaves Michael Couzens wondering, in his words, “whether they want to get into it or whether they want to obstruct it.” Couzens, now a partner in a consultancy firm whose clients include LPTV applicants, also wonders about ABC, which has applied for five low-power stations, all within the service areas of ABC ownedand-operated stations. NBC applied for 11. Couzens thinks it is unlikely that networks will ever be allowed to own lowpower stations, but “the investment in an application is so small that it’s a worthwhile gamble.” If the application is not approved, it will at least have “served the purpose of tying up somebody else.” Couzens even has doubts about the intentions of the CPB, which has always made loud noises in favor of low power, but which nevertheless took the FCC to court to halt the granting of interim applications. “CPB and PBS,” he says, “get community-service grants for their TV stations. lf there are more TV stations, and those stations get community-service grants, their share of the Federal subsidy goes down. So they will fight this, hammer and tongs. They're worse than the networks.”

“Not at all,’ responds Robert Bednarek of CPB. “We were the ones who originally proposed the service. Our disagreement is with the way in which it is being instituted...To suggest that we oppose low-power television is a bit bizarre.”

The FCC, meanwhile, is working hard to salvage LPTV. In April, the commission suddenly announced it was shutting the floodgates on interim applications, with certain very narrowly defined exceptions. Everyone else will have to wait at least until this fall, when the FCC votes on whether to give low power the final goahead.

Even then, the present confusion and internecine recriminations are likely to remain, raising doubts that the concept of low-power TV will indeed be salvaged. And, if it is, there's still the fear that commercial interests will co-opt a good portion of the market for purposes that have little to do with the original concept of LPTV: to bring service to the electronically deprived and to give minorities a piece of the action.