Platform

Stephen Olsson and Link TV

Nestled in a quiet office between Telegraph Hill and the Embarcadero in San Francisco’s Waterfront District, hard by the advertising agencies and KGO, Link TV provides a wide-angle antidote to the standard television news mix of hit-and run stories and doltish commercials. The free public-interest channel, founded in 1999, aims to inform Americans about corners of the globe, notably the Middle East, that tend to be oversimplified or ignored by other broadcast media. Link TV’s programming encompasses international documentaries, music, news and culture, from works that might be familiar to regular film festivalgoers to pieces that never received any U.S. exposure. Its lineup of original programming includes the highly respected "Mosaic," a daily digest of news from the Middle East, and "Global Pulse," a three-to-five minute daily segment. Link TV flies under the radar hereabouts because it’s only available to San Francisco cable subscribers on weekends. (The educational access channel, Comcast 27, is the place to find Link TV beginning midnight Friday through 7 a.m. Monday. Check out the Web site, www.linktv.org, for more information.) The core audience of five million weekly viewers gets the channel via satellite, on channel 375 on DirectTV and 9410 on Dish network. We sat down with Stephen Olsson, a veteran Bay Area documentary maker and Link’s senior director of original programming, to get the scoop.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, political film, tv, world cinema