Many communities that undertake rebroadcasting and cablecasting offer a local community TV or radio channel, or a weather or community bulletin board. For some communities, the ability to offer such local services is the main driver to set up the distribution infrastructure.

The minimum cost is for a CD, DVD player or computer to connect to your digital transmitter or cable head end to play back music, videos, or local text event or weather information. With this basic equipment, people around the community could create their own announcements, videos or music clips for upload to the server for automated playback.

Most communities that elect to have a locally originated service go further than this, however. They create a studio or recording facility in a library, community centre, town hall, or other municipal building. Interviews, cultural events, and meetings can then be broadcast or cablecast live using multiple cameras.

Thanks to the excellent quality of small consumer camcorders and video editing software, costs can start at a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand, depending on how elaborate you want the facilities to be and whether you want to staff them on a full-time basis.

Unlike the distribution infrastructure, which involves minimum fixed costs to "get in the game", local production facilities can be gradually enhanced over time.

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You have to pay a fee to the satellite provider of the services you want, to cover the costs of maintaining the satellite. This is called a downlink fee. A typical downlink fee might be $130 per channel per month.

If you're planning to offer a wireless Internet service, you'll also to have to pay an uplink fee so that residents can not only access information and web pages from other parts of Canada and the world, but send information back out to the rest of the world. These fees are calculated by the bandwidth you need (how much information residents of your community will be sending and receiving).

While satellite Internet is available direct to individual households in rural Canada already at between $50 and $150 per month from various companies (with a dish), these rates can be brought down significantly by sharing the service. For example, you may be able to get rates down to as low as $20 per household per month, just because not everyone will need to use it at the same time, or equally heavily from one day to the next.

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Generally speaking, channels that are available free over-the-air in other parts of Canada are free; for example, the CBC, CTV and Global.

"Specialty services" that are available only on cable or satellite (like the History Channel, the ichannel, or the Discovery Channel) have to be paid for: a set fee per household.

Fees range from a couple of cents per subscriber per month for channels that are less in demand, to over $2 per subscriber per month for services such as TSN.

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Maintenance costs for the physical equipment in a community distribution scheme can be unpredictable, as they can depend on infrequent events outside the community's control: a storm, flooding, human activity that damages a buried cable line.

In general, however, maintenance costs amount to relatively little compared to setup, channel subscription and downlink costs.

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The setup costs for distribution of television, radio, (wireless) Internet and other services can vary enormously, depending on geography, how big your community is, what brands you buy, what quality you want, and whether there are technicians resident in your community that are willing to help you install it at low cost.

The figures provided in the links below are low-end estimates for the major equipment you'll need, supplied to us by communities who are currently offering these services. They have often begged, borrowed, and called in favours to arrive at the most economic solution.

• Rebroadcasting
• Cablecasting

Some of the pros and cons of rebroadcasting versus cablecasting include:

1. Coverage

   Depending on your geography, you may be able to reach people over a wider area by rebroadcasting with a high-power transmitter. Cable networks tend to be cost-effective in densely populated towns and cities, where houses are close together, or in apartment blocks.

2. Number of Channels and Services

   While each digital transmitter can carry a maximum of about a dozen SD TV channels, and you have to keep adding another transmitter to offer more channels--you can carry hundreds of HD channels over a cable network, including broadband Internet.

   Rebroadcasting is therefore a cost-effective way to offer residents a relatively small selection of TV and radio channels, and possibly wireless Internet. Residents who want more channels and can afford them will still have the option of subscribing to a satellite TV service.

3. Maintenance