Catholics in New Media: CatholicTV

About a quarter of the population of the United States is Catholic. Yet, most people have limited to no Catholic programming offered in their cable and satellite TV packages (anywhere from 0-2 channels). I am extremely thankful for the channels that we do have, but because I’ve seen how effective they’ve been, I’m excited to have many, many more.

We get hundreds of channels on BASIC cable these days. 90% of them are terrible and completely useless. Why is it that there are hardly any Catholic TV stations? Probably because many of us haven’t requested them yet. And we probably haven’t requested them yet because we haven’t known what to request or haven’t been motivated to request them.

CatholicTV is trying to change that. And they’ve got me motivated to help.

When I first saw the quality of their programming, I was baffled as to why I hadn’t heard of them before and why they weren’t in every basic cable package. Especially because CatholicTV is available to carriers free-of-charge! That’s right, your cable or satellite provider can carry CatholicTV for free, you just need to let them know you want it.

That’s why CatholicTV has started a recent campaign to get a lot of digital signatures to support the spread of their programming. All you have to do is go here and fill out the short form to show your support. It takes less than a minute and it will be one of the most well-spent minutes of your day.

Another thing I love about CatholicTV is that, aside from offering some really great programs for Catholics, they have also done a great job of integrating it all with other new media experiences. They have an active blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, an iPhone app, 3D TV and even an embeddable video widget called CatholicTVjr (below):

Don’t forget to go show your support!

Catholics in New Media is a weekly series highlighting something particularly awesome going on in the Catholic world of new media.
Miniature from a 13th-century Passio Sancti Georgii (Verona).

St. George: A Saint to Slay Today’s Dragons

COMMENTARY: Even though we don’t know what the historical George was really like, what we are left with nevertheless teaches us that divine grace can make us saints and that heroes are very much not dead or a thing of history.