Illinois AG's Office Examining U-Verse's PEG Programming

Responding to complaints from public-access producers and city officials, the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is examining public access programming on AT&T's U-verse service to determine whether the delivery method somehow violates state law. Producers have complained about public-access programming on the Internet-protocol-delivered service since the day it debuted. AT&T aggregates all local programming on a region onto a single channel. Viewers enter a Web page listing all possible content providers, and must look for the desired programmer, wait for content from that source to load, then pick from various programs. Critics say it can take as long as a minute for content to load, adding that the delivery method disables such technology as second audio programming; and prevents channel surfing. A viewer must "back out" of the public-access page before they can view commercial content. Critics also contend that the public-access streams are not of the same signal quality as commercial channels delivered by AT&T, critics add.