Republished from the Oct. 16 Tri-County Sunday...

By ALEX DAVIS
Tri-County Sunday

Present Adelphia customers in Emporium, Coudersport, Port Allegany, Austin and Routlette will become Zito Media subscribers when a transition takes place during the early morning hours Monday.

Cable television and Internet access, which includes e-mail and personal Web space, are the services involved in the switchover.

Cable television channels will be unchanged for now. Zito Media will provide customers with 65 channels as part of the classic package and over 100 channels for the digital package. They will also offer high-definition television which makes images clearer on specialized high-definition capable television sets.

Zito Media President James Rigas said that he plans to make Video-On-Demand available to subscribers. With this feature, they can have over 1 ,200 hours of programming where they can fast forward, rewind and pause television shows. He envisions customers using Internet-based telephony (VoIP) if they wish.

Cable customers in Coudersport and Port Allegany will have a new community- based channel in a few weeks. Emporium has its own channel for placing non-profit organizational events, but cannot show videotapes of local events. Zito Media plans on working with school districts to provide tape recording that can be shown on the channels.

"(We) want to provide as much local content as we can," Rigas said.

High -speed Internet connections will be offered in two packages: standard and premium. Zito Media is keeping the same services that Adelphia has supplied to customers, but with some improvements.The company is going to make the upstream and downstream Internet speeds 50 percent faster within 30 days of the transition.

Subscribers who use the free Web site hosting service with Adelphia will notice two changes: Zito Media plans on expanding the current storage offering of 10 megabytes to 30 megabytes. It also will allow users to change what their Web site address.

E-mail users will have to be proactive in implementing their new e-mail address. They have been told to amend their e-mail current address by replacing the adelphia.net domain name with the zitomedia.net domain name. Users were issued computer generated passwords to log-in to their e-mail accounts last week. According to an update from Zito Media, users must log-in in to their Zito Media accounts by Oct. 27.

There's 6,000 Adelphia television subscribers and 2,000 Internet users in Emporium, Coudersport, Port Allegany, Austin and Routlette that will be taken over by Zito Media. Emporium has 1,800 users in both categories.

Zito Media will reopen the Adephia office in Emporium and use the location for cable modem and remote control pick-ups. It will be operated three to four hours a day.

Additional information about Zito Media can be obtained by sending postal mail to: 611 Vader Hill Road in Coudersport, PA 16915 or by logging on to their Web site at: www.zitomedia.net.