January 16, 2003

NUTV may expand future programming

The new NUTV system in undergraduate residence halls may feature campus programming of news, lectures, concerts, sports and other events in the future.

Student Bridget Bush watches CNN from her laptop at her residence hall desk.

photo by Jim Ziv

NUTV, piped this fall into students’ computers via Northwestern’s residential switched Ethernet data network, has the capacity to expand televised programming, said Mort Rahimi, vice president for information technology.

Northwestern is believed to be the first university to offer digital entertainment TV delivered to student computers. NUTV receives signals from the local cable provider and then encodes selected channels to MPEG digital format for transmission over the campus network to student computers.

As launched in September, NUTV provides 20 stations — from ESPN to Cable News Network and local broadcasts — for the 4,350 computers in living units.

The stations were selected in a poll of students, who voted last spring for the service. The cost of the service is added to room and board costs for residence halls.

The key to providing digital television to student computers is the switched Ethernet upgrade to Northwestern’s data network installed in 2000. Using 2 million bits per second per channel, said Rahimi, the network can transmit images and sound comparable in quality to cable television. A future planned version of the system will use 6 million bits per second, exceeding the quality of present cable programming.

Students access the service by opening a Web browser and clicking a link that takes them to the channel guide and support pages. It’s the same connection students use to surf the World Wide Web or check e-mail.

The computer mouse doubles as the remote control, and students simply click on the channel they want to watch. They can make the picture window as big or as small as they want on their computer screens and can watch TV programs while performing other functions on their computers.

NUTV offers an onscreen program guide, a preview window and a player with its own volume controls and channel selector. The system prevents viewers from recording programs to a hard drive or forwarding the signal to other computers.

“We’re delighted that we can provide this service to students,” said William Banis, vice president for student affairs. “It’s something they’ve wanted for years.”

Cable TV has been available in common rooms in residence halls for several years, but it was not economical to wire the residence halls for cable television, according to Dave Carr, director of telecommunications and network services for Information Technology.

Tom Board, director of technology support services for Information Technology, said, “After a prolonged search and extensive testing during spring quarter, we were able to identify a vendor, VideoFurnace, a company that creates digital video systems for educational, hospital or corporate networks, that could leverage the power of our world-class network in providing this service in an economical manner.”