Democracy in action: Howard Blumenthal wants you to tell your story on TV. (photo by christopher gabello)

Free your MiND

A small-screen maverick brings user-generated TV to Philly.

by John Steele

In 1977 Warner Bros. introduced a media innovation in Columbus, Ohio, that would quietly change the face of American television. It was called Qube TV, and it allowed viewers to watch programs on demand. The system included 10 pay-per-view channels (unheard of at the time), 10 broadcast channels and 10 community channels. Among these community offerings were Pinwheel (which would later become Nickelodeon) and Sight on Sound, a visual radio show offering concert footage and music-oriented programming. The channel was based on a business plan hatched by a young, inexperienced stringer for Warner Bros. Records named Howard Blumenthal. It’s known today as MTV.

Thirty-one years later and Blumenthal has been around the TV universe and back. He created shows like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and wrote This Business of Television, now considered the bible of the industry. He’s worked on every network on the dial. Throughout the years he’s watched as the MTV generation has been replaced by the YouTube generation, television has become a wash of instant nostalgia and on-demand content, and the Internet has become the new cutting edge. But the ideas his Qube envisioned—television on demand, for people with short attention spans, tied into the local community—are still relevant.

So he’s created MiND TV, a short-form public access station. Anyone can produce MiND’s shows—they run in five-minute blocks and are broadcast on Channel 35 and as clips on the Internet. It’s television by the people, for the people. In short, it’s a supercharged YouTube with a brain.

“When you go to YouTube, you don’t know what you’re going to see,” Blumenthal says. “But it’s not a brand, it’s not a channel. It’s just a lot of stuff.”

And this illustrious career led him to … Roxborough? The squat, unassuming WYBE building at 8200 Ridge Ave. hardly reflects the glamorous lifestyle many associate with high-powered TV executives. The bushes are overgrown, the building could use a coat of paint and Center City is several miles down the road. But according to Blumenthal, it’s not what you have, but what you do with it. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“When we did MTV, we were working on a very small budget,” he says. “We were in Rockefeller Center overlooking Central Park, but our set was made of paper and the decoration was Avery fluorescent labels. So we had a choice between the big building in Center City that we could barely afford, or start in Roxborough, keep it quiet and funky, and wear shorts to work every day.”

Sandy Fulton used to be a naval officer, but since Vietnam she’s been an advocate for causes like veteran treatment and alternative energy. She says she loves the atmosphere and openness of MiND.

“Try going to one of the big TV station affiliates in Philadelphia and ask to speak to a producer,” she says. “They’d laugh you out of the place.”

Indeed, the most fascinating thing about MiND is the way its grab-bag of viewers rallies together, for no reason other than to have a say in what’s on their TV.

Jasneet Kaur is in Roxborough visiting her sister at the apartment across the street from the MiND studios. She saw a sign for an open house and just wandered in. At first she sat silently, but by the end of the meeting she was pitching program ideas.

Skip Ehrig drove from Central Jersey to attend the open house. His reason? He went to watch The X-Files on the Sci Fi Channel only to find his cable company had replaced Sci Fi with MiND TV. When he found out he could be a part of it, he jumped at the chance.

In order to teach members to tell their stories in five-minute packages, Blumenthal and his team have developed MiND Boot Camp, a media-making workshop designed to take a large-scale idea and edit it, light it, shoot it and bring it to the screen. More important, they teach members how to make it break through the clutter of today’s crowded reality TV landscape.

“If it’s colorful and interesting and the action keeps moving and the people are engaging, you’ll stop,” Blumenthal says of his newly minted TV stars. “And you’ll tell your friends.”

There have been several ideas thrown around the community, like creating compilation DVDs of popular shows and selling them, or opening MiND studios in other cities. But as big as it gets, Blumenthal never wants MiND to lose sight of the community aspect. With contributors from grandmothers to activists to people wandering in off the street, this is truly reality TV. And he plans to keep it that way.

“This isn’t about us creating something for the community—it’s about us creating something with the community,” Blumenthal says. “We created a sandbox and we want to play in it, but we want others to play in it too.”