By C. K. Gerhartsreiter
Staff Writer

In today’s television-centric San Quentin, having a guide to help with show planning would go a long way to optimize one’s leisure time. Luckily, almost all television sets (except for the pre-flatscreen “Bubble” sets) have integrated channel guides using “metadata” to display exactly what content would appear on the screen and when.

On March 2, the channel guides stopped displaying their helpful information. San Quentin Rehabilitation Center residents felt lost in their screen time planning. Soon, they started to inundate San Quentin’s TV department with complaints.

For some residents, the channel guide played an active role in their rehabilitation.

“Having a television guide on my TV allows me to plan my day,” said resident Dale Moore, “but more importantly, it allows me to exclude shows that portray certain situations that I do not wish to see because they go against my rehabilitation goals.”

The problem happened during the days that coincided with the move of the local television broadcast equipment to the new Learning Center from the former education complex. Housed for decades in a backroom of Education A-Building, the equipment did its job of distributing the television signals (and the metadata) after they left San Francisco’s Sutro Tower and arrived at San Quentin.

“I understand the frustration,” said Skyler Brown, senior television specialist and department head of SQTV. “I know why you guys need the metadata and it is a great frustration, a terrible frustration, that it has been lost and you’ve had to navigate the television channels without that information. I feel for the population and I am trying to get it back, but right now I don’t know what to do to get it back.”

Brown explained, “A TV specialist working with headquarters standardized the channels across the whole state.” He elaborated that the new channel assignments put certain channels (Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, etc.) on the same channel numbers at every facility in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “I guess they just wanted to standardize the channels to make it easier for the population to find whatever station they’re looking for.”

Brown continued, “When they did that, it caused the metadata to drop. I told them about this problem and they said that they didn’t change the signal so whatever was coming in before is the same and should still be the same. I told them that it wasn’t and they’re saying ‘we didn’t do anything different with the signal so there’s nothing we can do to get it [the metadata] back.’”

Resident and Media Center worker Tony Tafoya offered an amended explanation. He said, “What I think happened was because [the TV specialist from headquarters] was less than a month from retirement, he just rushed to set up the entire system and now we are stuck with what we have.”

Asked who could repair this problem, Tafoya replied, “Nobody that I know. Nor do our television specialists here at San Quentin have the knowledge or the training to actually fix this issue. Until we get an expert who knows how to set up the actual channels, we will not be able to figure it out. The short answer is: no one knows.” He added that the person who made the change had since retired.

Even resident Lee Jaspar, SQTV’s most experienced employee (he has worked there since 2013), found himself in the dark about a solution. He echoed Brown’s theory, but with more technical detail: “I believe the problem involves the new formatting of our television channels. I believe that once channels were moved from their broadcast frequency to a frequency other than the broadcast frequency (for example, Channel 9 now shows up on Channel 6), the metadata transmitted with the original broadcast is left out of the formatting and is therefore not transmitted through our system to the end user.”

Asked about a solution, Jaspar replied, “We’re guessing that’s the problem, but I don’t have the full technical expertise to fix it. No one here does. In my mind, the solution is to reformat the system to include the metadata.” Jaspar added, “I will continue to do my best to provide those who can reformat the system with as much information as I can, based on my experience and education, and to continue to provide information about what is being received by the population so that they can exercise their best judgment in completing the repair of the system.”

Resident Nick Johnson said, “I wish they had told us what went wrong because I spent hours rescanning, thinking that something went wrong with my TV set.” He then voiced the wishes of many SQRC residents: “I wish they would fix it and I also wish the channels would go back to their original order.”