What happened to our Mass on Cable TV?

A note from the
communications office

By Raymond L. Delisle
Director of Communications

Since late October, and sporadically over the past year, local cable access channels have been experiencing technical difficulties getting the diocesan Sunday and Daily Masses, which means in some locations the Mass has not always been available to viewers. Why is this happening?
 For more than 35 years, the Diocese of Worcester has been serving homebound Catholics with the Daily Mass and Sunday Mass on local cable stations in different parts of the diocese. For the past year, however, it has meant adopting a completely different technology – and a lot of stress and adapting when it doesn’t work as planned.
 Until 2020, the diocesan TV Ministry was able to connect directly to Charter TV3 to carry the Daily and Sunday Masses in all the towns which Charter, now Spectrum, serves in Central Massachusetts. When Spectrum corporate decided to shut down TV3 and focus on a regional news station, the diocese was left without a channel. Local access stations like WCCA channel 194, “the People’s Channel” in Worcester, were quick to offer an option if a way could be found to get the Mass onto their channel.
The good news was that the diocese was able to incorporate new technology to put the Mass on a “cloud” server, and individual cable access stations could tune their systems into that cloud to put the Mass on the air live or at a scheduled time each day. What sounded like a simple idea turned out to be far more complicated technologically.
While larger cable access stations have dedicated or regularly available engineering resources, smaller stations are not staffed to do more than carry a few shows from their local towns. Programming their equipment to reach the cloud server proved to be more challenging than originally thought, particularly when the “address” changes.
For 34 years the Daily Mass went to one location at Charter using a dedicated cable line. Unless that was affected by a storm, it was reliable. Now that the Daily and Sunday Masses are sent via the internet, there is no direct route, and the address can change, sometimes without warning, as happened in late October. That forces each of the local cities and towns to reprogram their equipment with a new “address” at which to find the Mass to carry it live. Although we were told this shouldn’t happen, the reality is that it, in fact, does happen.
Thankfully, Mass was live again on Wednesday and will hopefully keep working. We don’t want our viewers to think that either the diocese or the various town cable access stations don’t care when the Mass is not on TV. This has been a totally new world of technology for all of us and it takes a variety of engineers working in different time zones to solve these issues when they arise. We must ask for patience when this happens and prayers that it will be resolved quickly and remain stable for a longer period of time.
 Meanwhile, for those viewers who watch on computers, tablets, or their phones, the Masses continue to stream live each Sunday and weekday. As our system gets more stable, we look forward to expanding to cable access stations which were never available to us because they are not in Spectrum communities. That will be really good news!