After a test run of Internet TV, the Undergraduate Life Committee gave mostly positive reviews to the idea of making TV channels and movies accessible on student computers.
The Undergraduate Life Committee (ULC) met yesterday afternoon with the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and representatives from Video Furnace, the company providing the technology for Internet TV, to discuss the potential benefits and downfalls of the Video Furnace system.
Undergraduate Life Chair Caroline Chopko '07 said the purpose of the meeting was for OIT to gauge whether students would use the new system and what functions they would want.
"[Internet TV] has pluses and minuses," USG Vice President Rob Biederman '08 said in an interview. "Right now the ULC sees more pluses than minuses and is ready to give the thumbs up to [Vice President for Campus Life Janet] Dickerson and OIT to go ahead."
With the new system, students will be able to watch only a handful of the 31 currently available channels through a cable subscription. While ABC, CBS and CNN would be available, popular channels Fox, ESPN and HBO would not.
Biederman said the "real drive" behind this effort is to show academic videos outside the classroom setting, adding that video on demand will not be available because of legal concerns, even though the technology is available as part of the Video Furnace system.
Students can watch up to eight channels simultaneously and view movies for classes from their personal computer.
"[ULC] is going to support the move to access class material outside of the cluster computers, which would be great for students," Chopko said.
Carolyn Urena '08 agreed that the ability to watch movies from her own computer would be a benefit of the new system. "[I]f I could watch movies [for class] on my computer instead of going to the cluster, that would be a lot easier for me," she said.
Chopko said the ULC is also excited about the potential to broadcast students' extracurricular productions, which would allow those students to share their creative work with more people. The Video Furnace technology also supports video conferencing, Biederman said.
One concern with the new technology is that it might burden students with additional costs. The University could either raise tuition, student fees or subscriber fees to pay for the additional Internet capabilities, Biederman said. He added, however, that he thought a tuition or student fee hike would be unlikely.
"We want to make sure it doesn't cost any more to watch things on your computer than on your TV," he said.
In a recent unscientific poll on Point, the USG's Web portal, 67 percent of students said they would support an Internet-based TV service for students. Forty percent said that while they supported the idea of Internet TV, they were worried about pricing.
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