Rebekah Kim
Small Screen, Small Viewership
yes, columbia has a tv station
PrintColumbia students, notorious instigators of riots and hunger strikes, aren’t known for being apathetic. Yet when it comes to Columbia’s undergraduate television station, it seems as though Columbians couldn’t care less. “I’ve seen it once, but only because we were flipping through the channels and it came on,” says Emily Shea, a Columbia College sophomore.
“I’ve never seen it. What kind of things do they show? What channel is it on?” wonders College sophomore Ella Magun.
“We have a TV station?” asks Vir Patel, a sophomore in the College.
There may be technical reasons that explain why few Columbians tune in to CTV shows. “The closed circuit network really doesn’t transmit a high quality signal, so watching CTV through the Columbia cable TV service is aesthetically very unappealing,” says Robert Brink ’09, an MFA Candidate in the Columbia School of Arts’ Film Division who worked as a writer and actor on a CTV comedy sketch program as an undergrad. “Over the past few years, CTV has also started to stream their programs via the web, and of course, that is also a mixed experience. Some shows work better than others as streaming web content.”
It may be that CTV is also taking on an impossible task, working in a genre that college students encounter professionally on a daily basis. “Everyone has watched television, and everyone has an opinion about the shows they watch. It would be rare or impossible for a student TV show to come close to matching the production standards one comes to expect from watching cable or network TV,” says Brink.
But Columbia students are competent and dedicated, and we go to school in a global media hub. That means that there should be a core group of students dedicated to producing a high-quality TV station that students know about and want to watch. The very fact that we live in one of the nation’s TV capitals, though, might be what makes our on-campus TV suffer. Students really dedicated to TV may be more likely to get internships and devote time to professional TV production in New York City rather than on campus.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, schools in the middle of nowhere may actually have more successful on-campus TV stations. “My friends from home pressure me to watch it [CTV] only because they’re talking about their schools’ shows so I feel like I have to show them my school’s,” says a student who wishes to remain anonymous. “All of them have really cool shows. They go to schools like Vassar and Wesleyan. They have cooler radio shows and everything in general.”
These trends haven’t gone unnoticed by the highers-up at CTV. In fact, CTV has planned to make over their Web site in order to try to ramp up viewership—a redesign the group hopes will be completed by January 2010.
“Barnard and some dorms don’t get CUIT cable, and since students have a tendency to get their TV online anyway, it’s to our advantage to expand in that area,” explains John Murphy-Teixidor, a SEAS senior and CTV’s news director. “We’re currently in the middle of a massive Web site overhaul that’s been going on for about a year. We’re looking to put all our newsroom, scheduling, inventory, publishing etc. on one site to simplify operations.” Previously CTV videos had been available only through a host of different online video providers. This move towards consolidation online will, hopefully, encourage more viewers.
And the current situation may not even be as bad as students make it sound. While CTV doesn’t keep records of how many people watch their shows on actual television sets, they do have statistics for hits per day for their news program online. “As a rule, we don’t release our stats, but in a given week, we can get upwards of 3,000 hits depending on the week’s news,” says Murphy-Teixidor—a respectable number.
Perhaps there’s nothing unique about the lack of interest in CTV. Such apathy extends to many of Columbia’s cultural offerings. In a perfect world, students would go right from the CC classroom to a black box production of “Antigone,” to an Afro-Caribbean dance show in Lerner Party Space, but it’s just impossible to try to see and do everything happening at Columbia on a given night.
“I’m sure those same people have never heard of the two film festivals or the seven different ethnic dance companies on campus, or the yearly production of a Greek play in ancient Greek that’s done at Barnard,” says Brink. “Many students don’t know that you can eat free food practically seven days a week from club events around Lerner. Just because everyone knows that TV exists somewhere in the world doesn’t guarantee that they know Columbia has a TV station.”
So maybe students are too inundated with on-campus entertainment options to bother taking the time to watch CTV, or maybe we’d just rather spend our precious free time watching Pam and Jim act out professionally crafted scenes than watching our peers on CTV chat on a sofa. But even if the camera work can be shaky and the visuals grainy, no one is qualified to report and televise Columbian life better than Columbians themselves. And for that, CTV deserves its airtime.
29 October 2009
vol. 7, issue 7
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