Dartmouth will deactivate traditional cable television wiring in College housing on Jan. 15, leaving DarTV as the sole television service on campus. DarTV sends television signals over the Ethernet, which allows users to view 62 channels on personal computers. Students can rent or buy converter boxes from Dartmouth Computing Services to connect televisions to the network.
The boxes, which can be rented for $10 a month or bought for $250, convert the television signal sent over the Ethernet to a format that can be displayed on traditional televisions.
Last year, a variety of set-top boxes were tested in some College residence halls, but were returned at the end of the year. The new boxes use a higher signal quality and support high definition television. They also allow closed-captioning for hearing-impaired viewers, a feature whose absence in last years' boxes drew criticism.David Bucciero, director of Technical Services, said he was surprised by the high interest level in the set-top boxes because he and other coordinators of DarTV had expected students to give up their television sets.
"We envisioned students watching it on their computers, maybe using a large external monitor or a projector," he said.
Students who obtained the converters cited investments they had made in purchasing television sets as their reason for purchasing the set-top boxes.
"As an '08, I will only be using DarTV for two terms, so from a financial standpoint, it seemed to make more sense to rent the converter box," Kate Robb '08 said.
Ashley Cartagena '10 said she was unhappy about the expense of the converter box, but will continue to use her old television because buying a new monitor would be too expensive.
"It wasn't the ideal situation," she said. "DarTV never seems to work for me when I want it to."
Cartagena said she found viewing DarTV on her computer to be unreliable and subject to random outages.
The set-top boxes are equipped with hard drives and time-shifted recording capabilities, but these features are currently deactivated by the manufacturer, pending a Congressional ruling regarding copyright restrictions, Bucciero said. He added that Dartmouth would like to support these features if they are activated.
The switch is the final phase of the College's plan to integrate internet, phone and television service into one network, an effort that began with the 2001 introduction of the wireless network. Phone service migrated to voice-over Internet protocol in 2004.
Technical Services began experimenting with television streamed over the data network in 2003. Testing continued into 2007, as Network Services explored streaming the television signal over a wireless network during the pilot program, which did not require students to use an Ethernet cable.
The College may revisit the possibility of streaming signals over the wireless network, Bucciero said.
