All of your favorite stations at your finger tips
At the end of the day when it’s time to unwind from classes and work, sitting back and flipping of the television is a popular choice among students. And the housing on campus offers 94 channels to students to help them to take a break.
There are a wide variety of channels that are part of the Aggie Television channel lineup – everything from MTV to ABC Family. Two stations offer different movies around the clock.
Utah State University’s Housing and Foods Services has had cable television as part of the on-campus housing since the summer of 1999. Over the years, it has been changed to meet the demands of the students.
“The overall lineup is something that we have taken overtime, and with the availability that exists with some of the program providers,” said Jason Godfrey, the cable systems supervisor. “We’ve tried to build it as large and broad as possible to accommodate the many students out there.”
The spectrum of television programming that is part of ATV is broad, and keeps expanding to help meet the want of students.
“We try to carry as much variety as possible, which includes a line of programming that has been more recently added by request from the students,” Godfrey said.
A fee of $14 per apartment on campus that comes out of utility costs pays of the programming. There are also additional premium channels that students can access for an additional cost. The ATV programming is only available to students who reside on campus.
“We’re considered a private cable system so we cannot support anybody that’s not an on-campus affiliated group,” Godfrey said.
The two movie channels that help to make up ATV are Aggie Cinema and Aggie Advantage. Aggie Cinema is targeted towards an older audience. According to ATV’s website www.usu.edu/atv/, “this channel can only play movies with a G, PG, PG-13, or and R rating. R rated shows can only been shown of this channel after 5 p.m.”
The other station, Aggie Advantage shows more family oriented films. The Web site indicates “this channel will play G and PG rated movies, and periodically PG-13 movies after 7 p.m.”
Momi Wheeler, a junior majoring in family, consumer and human development said, “I think that it’s an advantage to everyone that lives on-campus, because their pretty new movies and people off-campus have to rent them. I also think that they have all types of movies that would please everyone.”
The movies chosen to be shown are picked from a committee of seven residential assistants that live in different areas around campus, Godfrey said.
Don Burger, the marketing director for ATV and a chairperson for the committee said, “We asked one RA from each area to be a part of this. We get together and talk about movies and put together a list that we vote on.”
For the upcoming school year ATV is going to be seeing some changes, Godfrey said.
The way that movies are selected is one aspect they are going to change. Godfrey said that they are going to try to involve more students in the selection of movies. They would like to have it set up electronically so that students could go online and vote for their picks.
“It’s going to be a lot of work but we think we can have it online for students next year,” Godfrey said.
One of the other key elements of ATV is the information channel. According to the Web site, “Information available on channel 3 includes news about community events, university calendars, athletic schedules, registration information and deadlines, and student oriented social activities.”
The information channel is available to students and organizations and is, “free of charge as long as they’re promoting academic or university events,” said Godfrey.
-rbarlow@cc.usu.edu