A Cable Network About the Real World : Television: The fledgling CamNet presents footage shot on 8mm cameras by activists, amateurs and artists. In Southern California, it is seen by about 100,000 viewers.

Inside the Democratic convention last July, a fledgling cable network, armed only with a home video camera, roamed the aisles alongside NBC, CNN and PBS. But while the establishment media aired the speeches and the spin of the assembled pols, the CamNet camera focused elsewhere: The constant milling and inattention of the delegates, the hot dogs and sauerkraut, a reporter complaining about the frequent evocation of God and the lack of anything healthy to eat.

“I’m actually for some sort of spirituality in school, but you can’t have God, because what about the people who believe in the Goddess? What about the secular humanists?” said correspondent Beth Lapides from somewhere in Madison Square Garden. “You really can get lost in this place. You get hungry, you get thirsty and the food here is really awful. And that very much symbolizes how hungry Americans are for some real food. How hungry I am for something nutritious to eat is how hungry America is for something good.”

The two founders of CamNet, a 6-month-old cable network that presents mini-documentaries and features shot on 8mm home-video cameras by a contingent of activists, amateurs and artists, have essentially the same philosophy.

“TV is boring. You flip through and every channel is the same thing,” said Nancy Cain, who operates CamNet out of her Venice Beach home with her partner, Judith Binder. “CamNet stops you. If you’re flipping around and you see this, it doesn’t look like public access and it doesn’t look like television, and it looks like something is happening, and it looks like it might be live and it looks like you might be right in the middle of it. It’s very often riveting and exciting. It’s NBC-Not.”

Only about 1 million people can see it, however. CamNet is available on cable systems in only eight cities, including Denver, Baltimore, Detroit and Philadelphia. In Southern California, CamNet can be seen by about 100,000 viewers on United Artists Cable in the East San Fernando Valley and the La Puente-Baldwin Park area.

Home video, of course, is no stranger to television. The videotaped beating of Rodney G. King changed the very history of Los Angeles. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” turned home bloopers into a Top 10 network smash, and “I Witness Video” shows grisly home video of accidents and disasters.

But Cain and Binder contend that CamNet is not “exploitative,” not out for the video “Boing!” that punctuates those other shows.

“We’re really the opposite of what you can see on television,” said Binder. “We’re trying to show events, issues or lifestyles that haven’t had their say-so before. We’d like to be a real alternative.”

The idea was born out of PBS’ “The 90s,” the populist camcorder magazine series on which Cain and Binder served as producers. When the program, now in its fourth and final season, died, they decided to test the concept on a broader scale.

Many of the stories CamNet has produced reflect the artsy, unorthodox background of the network’s founders, although Cain said that their only guiding philosophy is “freedom of speech.”

Binder, who was moved by the power of Frederick Weisman’s cinema verite documentaries, has worked as a director and videographer in the performance art scene. Cain was a member of the Video-freex, a group that toured the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s producing experimental videos on Woodstock, the Chicago Seven and geodesic domes. CBS actually commissioned a pilot of their work, but, Cain said, one executive “told me that it was five years ahead of its time. He was wrong. It was 20.”

The CamNet pieces--some sad, some funny, some haunting--include a visit to a condom store on Melrose Avenue to learn about teen-age sexual behavior, skinheads taunting Mexicans along the border, a trip to the Richard M. Nixon museum, a day in the life of New York City squatters and a demonstration in Washington in the aftermath of the King beating verdict.

About 20 correspondents around the country tape these stories on their own cameras and send the raw footage to Venice, where Cain and Binder sit side-by-side at a tiny editing bay in the back of Cain’s house. The duo trim and craft the raw tape into cinema verite reports--very few CamNet pieces contain narration--producing four hours of programming each month that is shown in repeated cycles.

Reaction has been mostly positive, Binder said. “Those who hate it call it a communist plot, but most people seem to love it.” The city of Alameda threatened to sue CamNet over its somewhat clinical look at a woman and the device she uses for sexual stimulation, Binder said, but that has been the only serious complaint.

Their office receives phone calls almost every day from viewers who want to help them expand into other areas. One teacher at San Fernando High School uses the CamNet reports in his civics classes. And Barbara Brownell, a North Hollywood mother of three who discovered her teen-agers watching CamNet one day, was so “turned on” by it that she went out and bought her own camera and started making tapes.

“It’s very intimate and very real,” said Brownell, who just shot a piece on a homeless man who warms his food on his car engine. “You can get people to say things that they would never say to a big camera with a crew and a big microphone boom. Just by turning on this little camera and pointing it at someone you can discover the kind of charming and incredibly poignant human stories that would never happen with Ted Koppel.”

Cain and Binder are financing the venture primarily out of their own pockets, paying their correspondents “essentially nothing.” Advertisers are scarce, even though one week of hourly ads costs just $504, or $3 per spot. One of CamNet’s most reliable sponsors, a Long Beach electronics store, burned down during the L.A. riots.

Nevertheless, Cain and Binder pledge to persevere. They brim with optimism that they will find their way onto thousands of expanding cable systems and make money for themselves and their dedicated contributors. They continue to seek underwriting from several companies that are compatible with their philosophy, and a Tokyo firm is interested in airing CamNet on late-night television in Japan, Cain said.

“I think that some rich Asian newspaper magnate is going to want to get into television or (the head of a huge cable conglomerate) is going to see something about us and say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls, but now I believe in you,’ ” Cain said. “I’m convinced that there is a market for us just like there is a market for Ted Turner’s cartoon channel. I mean, how many of these same old cartoons can you look at?”