New campus cable service spreads across campus

Georgia College & State University has signed a five-year agreement with College Cable Service for new and improved on-campus television cable service providing students with more channels and better service at a significantly lower price.

The new contract ends five years of cable services provided by Charter Communications. The deal saves GC&SU housing nearly $1 million over the next five years.

College Cable Services was GC&SU’s cable provider five years ago before Charter took over. Since then the company has made dramatic improvements.

The change was not related to “poor performance” said Director of Auxiliary Services Kyle Cullers who is leading the change over.

The new cable services provide students with 13 more channels than they had before. In addition, 10 other channels were switched out.

Cullars pointed out that students now have, “additional HBO channels and MTV-University which they have never had before.” More over, on-campus students will also be getting ESPN news, College Sports TV, the Game Show Network, NFL Network and the Woman’s Entertainment Channel.

Lost in the transition from Charter to College Cable are the Disney Channel, Animal Planet and Court TV.

“We have the ability to negotiate with College Cable,” Director of University Housing Dr. Paul Jahr said. “There is flexibility.”

This means that if University Housing sees a demand by students for the Disney Channel, they can get it back.

The flexibility also brings University Television in Atkinson to new heights.

“The goal is to have the ability to broadcast to or from any facility possible.” Jahr said.

Under the new service agreement UTV has the potential to add as many as 20 more channels. Channels that could for example play live shows out of Russell Auditorium, or the Centennial Center. During Charter’s contract the set number of channels caused UTV to block out channels, in this case three home shopping channels, to add in University Broadcast channels.

The negotiations for the switch over, more precisely the switch back, to College Cable Services started as early as February last year.

The money saved in the negotiations will go back to University Housing to help pay back a more than $90 million
mortgage. Implementing the system has not come without some obstacles.

“Significant structural damage” to important underground cable equipment is almost definitely the cause of cable interruptions currently taking place at Adams Hall and Sanford Hall, said Jahr. Most likely, recent construction in the area caused the broken equipment.

Since the damage is underground, many safety and legal issues come up. “You don’t just dig,” Jahr said.

About the transition and working with College Cable Services in general, Cullars said, “It’s been great…honestly it’s been great.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 2 2005. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry