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Il fenomeno delle tv di quartiere italiane e il caso Disco Volante in un ampio articolo sull'autorevole International Herald Tribune, Street Tv persists as it fights Rome. SENIGALLIA, Italy If you happen to be channel surfing in the Porto neighborhood of this seaside town on the Adriatic, you might come across "Citizen Berlusconi," a documentary about the Italian prime minister that has never been broadcast on any national television station in Italy. You will not find the program if you are anywhere else. In Senigallia, the program can be seen only in the 400 or so homes within the broadcast range of Disco Volante, the city's first "street TV" station, which beams from a cluster of normal TV antennas with a transmitting power of a mere 0.3 watts. Disco Volante, which means flying saucer, has been airing the documentary regularly since June, after it emerged victorious from an 18-month legal battle with the government over whether it was broadcasting without a license. Because of its legal vicissitudes, the tiny TV station has become a standard-bearer of sorts for protests over the peculiarity of the Italian communications situation, where the country's three main private channels are owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who also controls the three main public channels through his role as the head of the government. Disco Volante is part of an Italian movement of microbroadcasters beaming signals so circumscribed that in some cases they barely cover an entire apartment building. The station broadcasts from 9 a.m. to midnight, offering homemade videos, programs culled from the Internet and, at times, shows from other channels. Other street TV studios - currently some 50 street TV stations dot the peninsula, most of them run by nonprofit groups and even a priest or two - broadcast around the clock, and still others only a few hours a day. In general, their coverage is highly localized. In Senigallia, one regular program features the butcher from the open-air market in the town center talking about the day's best buy. Far from being seen as innocuous community service providers, however, these microbroadcasters have run into considerable legal problems because of Italy's stringent communications laws. The newsroom of Disco Volante, a hodgepodge of used computers and hardware piled high on a scuffed wooden desk, hardly seems like a hotbed of radical thought or a major network in the making. Franco Civelli, 67, the station's managing editor, is confined to a wheelchair and speaks with great difficulty, the effects of having polio as a child. Alessandro Giuliani, the cameraman, has Down syndrome. "That's why we called it Disco Volante," said Enea Discepoli, founder of the street TV station that is housed in a center for people with disabilities and which he directs, "because the disabled are seen by many people as extraterrestrials." Still, in September 2003, a few months after it began broadcasting by exploiting the so-called shadow zones of television frequencies, or areas where regular TV signals do not get through, the Communications Ministry shut down the station and confiscated equipment because it did not have a government license to broadcast. Such licenses have not been given out since 1990, when a law was passed that essentially froze the country's media panorama as it existed at the time. A court in Ancona ruled this year that Disco Volante could return to the airwaves, citing a legislative void in the matter of street TV stations and Article 21 of the Italian Constitution, which grants freedom of expression. "We're illegal but constitutional," said Civelli, who won an Italian journalism award for a documentary on handicapped access that was aired on Disco Volante two summers ago. Giancarlo Vitali, the founder of Orfeo TV, Italy's first street TV station, which began broadcasting in Bologna in the summer of 2002, said: "Does anyone really think that we're going to conquer the airwaves one small step at a time? It's laughable." Street TV stations, Vitali said, are a "symptom of the anomaly in the country where so much is concentrated in the hands of one man," referring to Berlusconi. Orfeo TV was a citizen's response, he said, "a political gesture - the size of the audience wasn't important." Still, street TV caught on in Italy, and dozens of stations have opened and been shut down in the past three years. On the Internet, Orfeo TV provides do-it-yourself instructions on how to make a street TV broadcaster at a cost of about 1,000, or $1,200, for the equipment, which consists basically of an aerial antenna, a transmitter and a normal VCR or computer to produce the video signal. Through its Telestreet Web site, it also makes free content available to other street television stations, as do two other online sites, Arcoiris and NGVision. Despite the court's ruling this year, small local broadcasters that do have television licenses are not convinced that street TV stations should be on the air. "You need to comply with the jurisdiction of the Communications Ministry, you need verification to make sure that a station isn't polluting - it has to be controlled," Giorgio Ciattaglia, an engineer who works closely with local television stations and says that street TVs are breaking the law, said during a conference on street television in Senigallia this month. "You can't let the situation become a jungle." And the ruling has not stopped the federal government from trying to shut down other stations, like Dream TV in Solopaca, near Benevento northeast of Naples, which came under fire and was shut down this year. Now, with digital terrestrial, which uses land-based antennas instead of satellites and is due to replace the existing system starting next year, street TV broadcasters will have new challenges. Opposition politicians in the Italian Parliament have presented a bill proposing that 10 percent of available digital frequencies on terrestrial systems be set aside for street and community stations, which are expected to have a hard time making the jump to the new technology, both financially and technically. "Private initiative was freer in Stalin's time," said Carlo Gubitosi, an engineer whose technical expertise helped Disco Volante win its case against the state. Gubitosi says street TV stations could play an important civic role as platforms for local administrations, and he still marvels at the hostility the microtelevision studios have encountered. "Do libraries threaten publishing houses?" he said. "These are social alternatives, not substitutes." fonte: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/23/business/tv24.php |
