Cable franchise fees that funded Public, Educational, and Government channels for decades are collapsing. Heres what replaces PEG: a branded streaming app, an always-on 24/7 channel, and a 90-day migration plan that doesnt depend on a third-partys content moderation queue.

Public access TV funding is collapsing.

You probably already know this if you run a town's civic media — the cable franchise fees that have paid for PEG (Public, Educational, Government) channels for forty years are drying up. Cord-cutting shrinks the cable subscriber base every quarter. Lobbyists are pushing state legislatures to let cable operators stop paying. Some municipalities have already had their PEG support cut to zero with thirty days' notice.

Meanwhile, your residents still need to watch the council meeting. The school board still wants to broadcast graduation. The library board still records its monthly forum. The content didn't disappear when the channel did. The distribution did.

Here's the practical question this post tries to answer: if your PEG channel goes dark, where do those streams go next, and how do you set that up without a year-long procurement process?

The reflex answer (YouTube) is half a plan

When a town loses PEG money, the first move is almost always "we'll just put it on YouTube." That works for an afternoon. Then the problems start.

YouTube is fine as one distribution surface. As your only one, it has three issues that hit civic content harder than they hit other categories.

First, copyright auto-detection. If your school board meeting happens to play a clip of a TV show during a presentation, or if a public commenter sings part of a song into the mic, YouTube can mute or remove portions of the recording. That's a public record getting altered by an algorithm. Some towns have had council meeting videos taken down entirely while they appealed. Public records shouldn't depend on a Content ID dispute.

Second, you don't own the home screen. Your viewers open the YouTube app and see whatever the algorithm decides they should see. Your council meeting is one tile in a sea of recommendations. There's no civic context, no agenda, no minutes, no "watch this segment about your zoning question" entry point.

Third, archival is fragile. Channels get suspended. Account recovery is unreliable. A municipality should not be one policy violation flag away from losing its public meeting archive.

YouTube belongs in the mix. It should not be the only place the meetings live.

What "your own channel" actually means in 2026

For most of PEG's history, "your own channel" meant a slot on the local cable system. The equipment lived in a closet at city hall, the cable operator handled distribution, and residents found you at channel 22 or 96 or wherever.

In 2026, your own channel means an app. Not a website, not a YouTube playlist — an actual Roku app and iOS app under your town's name, with your seal in the icon, that residents install once and open whenever there's a meeting.

That's the replacement architecture. The cable plant is going away. The TV-as-destination habit is not. People still want to watch the council meeting on the big screen in the living room. They just don't get there through coax anymore. They get there through Roku.

The cost equation has changed enough that this is now realistic for a town of any size. You don't need broadcast hardware. You need a camera that can encode to RTMP (most modern ones can), an internet uplink, and a streaming platform that hosts your live stream, your on-demand archive, and the always-on schedule that loops past meetings between live events.

The "always-on channel" piece matters more than people think

If you've only ever thought about civic video as a series of scheduled live events, this is the part worth pausing on.

A 24/7 channel — content that plays continuously whether or not a meeting is happening — is the closest digital equivalent to what PEG actually was. When residents turned to channel 22 on a Tuesday afternoon, something was playing. A taped meeting from last week. A library author talk from last month. A parks department safety video. The bulletin board scroll with the trash pickup schedule.

That "something is always there" property is what made PEG feel like a real civic channel rather than an event series. You can rebuild it in software. Take your meeting archive, your school board recordings, your library forums, your parks rec content, and program them into a continuous loop with a schedule. When a live meeting starts, the loop pauses and the live stream takes over. When the meeting ends, the loop resumes.

You don't need an enormous library to make this work. A small municipality with eighty hours of archive can program a credible always-on channel by accepting repetition — which residents accept just fine, because that's how cable channels always worked.

Branded apps without an Apple Developer relationship

The one logistical thing that has historically kept small towns off iOS is the Apple Developer Program. You need an organizational account, a D-U-N-S number, a legal entity matched to that number, annual fees, certificates, provisioning profiles, app review submissions, and someone who knows what any of those words mean. Most clerks' offices, reasonably, do not.

This is the part where Fluger is relevant if you're shopping for a way out of PEG limbo. We publish the branded app under your town's name, with your seal, your colors, your schedule — and we handle the Apple Developer relationship on our side. Same for Roku. You don't run an app store account; you run a channel. There's no ContentID-style muting on copyrighted audio, which matters when a public commenter quotes a song lyric or your library forum plays a clip in a presentation. And the 14-day free trial at fluger.tv/registration is enough to set up your live stream, upload a few archive videos, and see what the branded app actually looks like before you commit any budget.

That's the pitch. The broader point of this post is that the architecture — branded streaming app, always-on channel, live + VOD + scheduled loop — is what replaces PEG. We're one option for getting there. There are others. The one approach that won't work long-term is "we'll just upload to a third-party platform and hope for the best."

What to do in the next 90 days

If you're a town clerk, city manager, or comms lead watching your franchise fee revenue projections head south, here's the order of operations that has worked for the small and mid-size municipalities I've talked to.

First, inventory what video you already produce. Council meetings, school board, library board, parks rec board, planning commission, zoning hearings. List the cadence (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and the current destination (PEG channel, YouTube, internal recording).

Second, identify the archive. Hard drives at city hall. Recordings stuck on the cable company's server. DVDs in a filing cabinet. (Yes, still.) You will need this content to seed your 24/7 channel, so figuring out what survives in playable form matters.

Third, decide who owns the channel. This is usually the city clerk's office, sometimes IT, occasionally the communications director. Whoever it is, they need to be the single point of accountability — distributed ownership across three departments will stall.

Fourth, pick a platform and run a 90-day pilot with one meeting type. Council meetings are the obvious starting point because they're the most visible. Get the live stream, the same-day VOD, and a basic scheduled loop working for council before you try to consolidate every municipal body into one channel.

Fifth, add the other bodies one at a time. School board, then library, then parks rec, then the smaller commissions. By the time your PEG channel actually goes dark, residents are already trained on where to find the meetings — and your archive is searchable, captioned, and not subject to anyone's automated takedown queue.

The collapse of PEG funding is bad. It is not, however, the end of civic video. The infrastructure to replace it exists, it's affordable for a town of any size, and the residents who used to find you on channel 22 are already holding a Roku remote.

Start the migration before the cable check stops.