Upublic wants to do 2 things: 1) Destroy the historic model of public access TV, and 2) make money. Breaking the city contract, it has never (to my knowledge) begun to meet its contract requirements for original (first run) programming. It is also full of commercials and replaces PSAs with for-profit advertising as often as possible. In the past several months it has abandoned Comcast channel 26 to ProView Sports. That channel now runs sports programming, although I doubt it meets the city contract obligation for original (first run) programming. In 2013, uPublic abandoned Comcast channel 96 - an education channel - to JenTV. Jenny is a young girl showing top 20 music videos programming. Why uPublic would do that is a mystery. I suspect they couldn't make money with the channel and didn't want to be bothered with it. [As I write this review at 0930 JenTV has only a black screen.]
Its flagship program, Morning Brew with Larry Ahrens, is all happy talk. They refuse to talk about anything serious happening in ABQ. I know. I tried to get on their program and was met with deafening silence. This hour show is run 3 hours in the morning, once at 10pm, and sometimes in the middle of the night. That one show represents 16-20 percent of all uPublic programming!
The city of Albuquerque took the contract away from Quote-UnQuote that had run the station for 3 decades. It was one of the top 5 public access stations in the US. They had a terrific education channel.
The uPublic programming is a shambles. It is full of reruns and programming off the Internet. The station management is also incapable of updating and maintaining its website and even its Facebook page is out of date. Finding a program schedule took me months. Their website, http://www.upublic.tv is currently down.
The city connived to award uPublic, a company with no experience running TV channels, the contracts, perhaps because it was embarrassed by the high quality local programming produced by QUQ that sometimes was not flattering to the city. No problem with uPublic. The company won't produce anything that isn't canned and filtered through uPublic management.
And, remember, uPublic is all about the money. There is much more, but you get the idea. read more