Trinity Launches Free DirecTV in All Dorm Rooms via IPTV
President McGuire announced the launch of DirecTV at Trinity using IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) on Friday, February 6, 2009.
Cable TV Message from President McGuire
I am pleased to announce that our long-awaited cable television project is “live” on your desktop computer! If you are using an on-campus computer, click on this link: https://iptv.int.trinitydc.edu and click on “tune in” and, voila! The wonders of modern technology. You will also be able to find the link to this service on our website on the Current Students and Faculty/Staff web pages.
Trinity has made a considerable investment in this new service (nearly $200,000) in order to keep pace with the rapidly-changing expectations for higher education technology and services on campus. Because of the national digital television conversion (originally slated for February by the Federal Government, now pushed back to June), we decided that the time had come to move to cable. However, we did not go to the expense in order to watch more television, though we know our resident students will enjoy the entertainment options. We made this choice in large part because of the long-term pedagogical opportunities in certain kinds of programming (e.g., C-SPAN, educational channels), and in services that we can now obtain or deliver through video-on-demand and our own campus television channel.
This new service is known as IPTV — Internet Protocol Television — and it works over our existing internet cables. It does not work on wifi — your computer must be connected to the Trinity internet through an Ethernet cable. IPTV also does not work off-campus; this capacity is only available on-campus through the hard-wired Ethernet.
Resident students will receive additional instructions to pick up and install special boxes to hook up the IPTV service to your television sets. Deans Bowie and Moore will work with you to obtain the boxes, which you must return at the end of the semester. If you do not have a television in your room, you can still get the IPTV service on your computer if you have an Ethernet cable.
I want to take this opportunity to recognize and thank our incredible Technology Services Team, led so capably by Jim Tagliareni, who made this Trinity breakthrough possible. When we started talking about cable television last summer, I thought we would have to run new wires and go to a lot of expense and disruption to make the new pathways possible. Instead, Jim introduced us to the IPTV concept, which is used on many university campuses because of its flexibility and broader access. Behind the television channels you can now see on your desktops is an incredible amount of work that included replacing all of our servers and switches in order to support IPTV as well as the more robust use of our new Moodle platform for course management. This was a great deal of work, and I am so grateful to Jim and his team for creative hard work!
Thanks are also due to Gary Bricher and the Facilities team who worked with Technology Services on many components of this project. Also thanks to Timothy Russell for the exceptional web interface for IPTV.
Please join me in thanking everyone whose hard work and dedication to Trinity’s improvement made this new service possible.
Enjoy!
Tune in to IPTV
(on-campus only)