MNN HD Channel online - Television live

MNN HD Channel Live Stream

The MNN HD Channel is the high-definition outlet of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network - New York's public-access television operation and the largest community media center in the United States. One of MNN's five Manhattan channels, it carries entertainment and lifestyle programming for New Yorkers - programming, in the network's own words, for an audience with interests as diverse as the city itself - in high definition on cable and live online.

MNN's scale explains why the HD channel exists at all: the network reaches roughly half a million cable subscribers in Manhattan, airs more than ten thousand hours of original local programming every year, and broadcasts in more than forty languages - enough output to fill five channels and still overflow.

Five Channels, One Network

The HD channel sits at the end of a lineup built by subject: MNN1 Community covers local elections, New York politics and neighborhood issues; MNN2 Lifestyle explores everyday interests; MNN3 Spirit carries spiritual, religious and philosophical programming for various faiths; MNN4 Culture broadcasts multilingual arts programming from the point of view of Manhattan's diverse population; and the HD channel delivers its mix of entertainment and lifestyle programming in high definition. Community producers make the shows - MNN's whole model - and the Alliance for Community Media has repeatedly honored the network's programs with national community media awards.

The Firehouse and 38th Street

MNN was founded in 1992 as the successor to Manhattan's Channel J, with studios first on 23rd Street and later on West 59th. In 2012 it opened the El Barrio Firehouse Community Media Center in East Harlem - a neighborhood institution in its own right - and in March 2023 the main operation moved into a brand-new facility at 509 West 38th Street. The network's grant programs in the 1990s and 2000s helped community groups document some of the most historically significant issues of those decades, from AIDS activism and labor organizing to police brutality, community gardens, immigrants' rights and LGBT rights - an archive that makes MNN's facilities as much a historical institution as a broadcasting one, and a lineage that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2019 case about the boundaries of public-access television.

Public Access, Manhattan-Scale

Funded through community benefit agreements with the cable operators tied to their New York City franchises, MNN turns a regulatory obligation into the most productive public-access operation in the country. The HD channel is the polished end of the operation - the network's high-definition showcase - and the live stream and the archive carry it, along with programs from the whole MNN family, to viewers far beyond Manhattan's cable footprint: community television from the most media-saturated island on earth, still doing what public access was invented to do.

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