Communities that rely on cable franchise fees to finance local government initiatives like a public access TV channel may have to find other ways to pay for those services.
As the FCC continues to level the playing field for telecom services, cable franchise fee revenues will likely disappear.
Communities will have to reposition this as a right of way fee, instead of a tax on the cable franchise but not on other right of way users. It can't just be regarded as easy money from a single company.
They also have to do a better job of tying the fees to the actual cost of managing right of way. Communities have to catalogue and track what is in public right of ways, and then begin to track how much public works and planning money is spent on managing private uses of public right of way--otherwise there is no way to justify a right of way fee. The old way of just pulling a number out of the air ("We'd like $50K to support our public access station") is not going to work anymore.
It's more a land use issue than a technology issue. And they aren't making more right of way, so it is perfectly appropriate for communities to have an active right of way management program--that's one key role of government--management of scarce resources on behalf of the entire community.
What happens to public access TV? One option is to go all digital and deliver the content via IP TV, rather than the old-fashioned cable system. It could end up costing less, and the public would benefit since the public access "channel" would no longer have any restrictions on the amount of content available. Communities would just put all the programming on a server, and it would be available all the time.
For communities that already have some form of broadband, this is quite doable today. For communities that do not have affordable broadband, it is one more reason to start doing something about the problem.