Long-claiming to be in the building stages of development, Tufts University Television (TUTV) has come into its own. With just four weeks left in the semester, TUTV has completed its self-imposed makeover process begun nearly three years ago, though the road to get there has been long, winding, and full of potholes.
As a student-run organization, TUTV faces specific execution problems that do not normally have to be dealt with in real-world broadcasting settings.
"The hardest thing [about students running a TV station] is getting people to contribute man hours to production, camerawork, editing, etc.," said Luke Yu, TUTV's current Public Relations Director and next year's president.
One other trouble is that TUTV's unusually high percentage of work-study staffers creates a distinct division between work-study and executive board members. This division hindered the station's creative flow, a separation that Work Studies Manager, sophomore Veronica Adamson, is hoping to improve for next year.
But even after TUTV got students to commit to developing and producing shows, the station's equipment needed to be updated to avoid the archaic and unnecessarily long process of double dubbing between digital and analog formats. In the past, members had to convert content from a computer to a digital format, and then from the digital to a video cassette for broadcast.
The past academic year, TUTV received $11,008 from the TCU budget. Much of this was to cover the expenses of their new equipment.
This included a digital broadcasting system, the product of two and a half years of research and development on the part of senior George Rausch, TUTV's current president. The new system proved to be both a blessing and a curse, however, and it initially contributed to the station's headaches.
"It took awhile to get used to the new setup because new technology always confuses people," said Steven Schaffert, TUTV's Technology Director.
"I did anticipate a period of training and figuring things out," Rausch said. "I knew things would work, but figuring out exactly how things would work was a problem [fall] semester."
Once the new system was in place, startup glitches eclipsed its effectiveness. "Our other big problem was broadcasting to dorms on ResNet [Channel 23]," Rausch said. "At the beginning of the year, there was a problem with transmission."
As a result, when students plugged in their television sets to the dorms' cable jacks on Sept. 1, their TVs skipped right over TUTV's Channel 23 as the machines cycled through the local stations. Unless the set was then unplugged and reinstalled later in the year, Channel 23 remained perpetually missing from each student's station list.
According to Rausch, TUTV's problems are now over. "Everything has been accomplished," he said. "There were problems in the beginning, but it works."
One effort to build interest for the new equipment was TUTV's recent decision to open its Wednesday meetings up to the general student body to make the station more accessible.
"Before we were operating in Xandau up on a mountain and nobody knew what we did," Rausch said.
Now, however, students and faculty alike can participate actively and easily in TUTV, and Rausch is pleased with the result.
"People are excited about what we're doing. They see that we're organized now; people see now that, 'If I'm part of this organization, it will mean something instead of just throwing away my time.'"
Yu said TUTV's goal is to build more programming on the foundation set this year. "We're going to use what [Rausch] has put in place and what we've learned how to do, but my big thing for next year is programming."
In that spirit, this season will feature the debut of seven new episodes from a mixture of new and returning shows, including "Anything Eni" about an Albanian student adjusting to life in the United States, the playfully sarcastic "Haters," a guide to area nightlife called "New England Radar," and "TuftsSpot," a political show featuring documentary footage. Of course, there will be fresh new episodes of "Jumbo Lovematch."
A major objective is boosting on-campus coverage, a goal made more viable by the recent construction of an inter-campus broadcasting system.
"We can increase our level of content with live broadcasts from anywhere on the Medford-Somerville campus, the Boston campus or the Grafton campus," Rausch said.
