Charging on with a Hillsdale HD channel

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Students may soon be able to enjoy college events from the comfort of their own dorm or from any of the 697 cable connections Hillsdale pays for in their “bulk-bill” agreement with Comcast.
The expanding media department at Hillsdale College is in the midst of bidding and contract negotiations with cable providers to create their own high definition Charger Channel.
“We want folks to be able to see what’s going on,” Hillsdale Media Productions Specialist Scott Pienta said.
The Charger Channel is a way to show prospective students, donors, and other campus visitors how much is happening at Hillsdale College while also keeping students in the loop and providing another way to be involved with on-campus happenings.
“I could see a day where, with our monitors if we were connected, you could push out information that students would be interested in and visitors would be interested in,” Chief Administrative Officer Rich Péwé said. “It’s a communication tool.”
The department currently has the capability to create two channels that could be reached on campus televisions much like a local access channel. The fiber equipment already on campus was tested last week to determine if it’s functioning properly, and issues that were discovered will be resolved in the coming weeks.
Pienta said he is looking into technology improvements for the fiber optic lines and also for some of the older tube TVs on campus that would need additional hardware to output the high definition signal.
Issues with the school’s current cable provider, Comcast, include an inability to have live events on the channel. For Comcast’s system, events would need to be filmed and sent to the company to then be put out onto the channel.
Depending on Comcast’s abilities, Charger Channel may be broadcast to the entire Hillsdale community, something Pienta said he is concerned about due to lack of staffing in the media department.
Broadcasting to the community is something that Pienta said he sees as a possibility for the future of this project, but it is not a venture he wants to make right now.
Pienta said he is looking into options for Hillsdale to have its own equipment that receives and distributes television signals for cable channels, the cable headend.
“We would be able to insert our own information, our own channels, our own whatever we want,” Pienta explained. “We could stream whatever content we wanted to.”
Another aspect of the Charger Channel beyond streaming live events is replaying past events. The media department films many campus events which could be made into an edited and produced product to be re-run on the Charger Channel.
“We could compile a bunch of videos and stream that information 24/7 to our donors’ hotel rooms and/or to anyone on campus,” Pienta said.
One important consideration Pienta and Péwé both highlighted was the fear of decreased crowd sizes at college events.
“We want the students here,” Pienta said.
Péwé echoed Pienta’s sentiment.
“We’d have to be careful about that, you know,” Péwé said. “You wouldn’t want to do CCAs and film them and have people not show up.”
For college events happening off campus like at the shooting range or the Allen P. Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Statesmanship, however, the Charger Channel would provide an opportunity for students to watch an event they may not be able to attend.
“The vision is that at some point, we’re going to be putting a lot more out there, and if we’re going to make it good enough to go to the external audiences, it might be things that you’d want to watch on your Hillsdale programming,” Péwé said.
Pienta and Péwé are working to find the most cost-effective plan that will allow the department to create the most value for the campus. They are working on proposals and cost-benefit analyses to determine what makes the most sense for campus.