San Mateo’s KCSM rallying after serious funding woes

A donor has stepped forward with $400,000 to help struggling KCSM-TV/FM in San Mateo, Calif., reports the San Matean. The station is also finalizing a $120,000 spectrum lease agreement to share about one-third of its Mbps bandwidth with Sezmi, which meshes wireless broadcasting with broadband Internet for an alternative source of TV programming. The station is negotiating two more spectrum lease agreements worth about $100,000 each, including with KQED in San Francisco. All that sufficiently reassured KCSM’s Board of Directors at the San Mateo County Community College District, and it voted to provide a one-year funding extension. In January the station raised only $30,000 of a $1 million fundraising goal, and it dropped PBS last year due to funding problems.