Channel 3 demystified

Having grown up in the ’90s, most Pitt students probably remember channel 3 as the place where… Having grown up in the ’90s, most Pitt students probably remember channel 3 as the place where grainy VHS movies would transport them  — temporarily — to exciting places outside their living rooms.

For those living in the University’s residence halls, channel 3 Pitt TV, known colloquially to some as the “Pitt Movie Channel,” still hopes to offer — with its movies and other programming — the same sense of escape.

“Residents take advantage of it,” Lothrop Resident Assistant Abby Wellen said. “I have never heard a lot about it, but I know students use it.”

Unlike the channels provided through broadcast stations and subscription television providers, the content on Pitt TV isn’t determined by ratings or networks, but rather by the Residence Life community itself.

“The [Residence Life] program coordinators vote on what movies are put on the movie channel,” Pitt TV’s current schedule-maker Brittney Hein said. “It’s not just me.”

The group selects movie programming from new releases, older favorites like “Dumb and Dumber” and viewer requests. Hein, a program coordinator herself, then schedules the movies in a way that tries to accommodate each film’s audience.

“I pick the more popular movies for primetime,” Hein said. “We have ‘Inception’ on the list and that usually gets a slot between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. when more Pitt students would be watching. If it’s Saturday and there’s a … game on, I’ll put on ‘Dumb & Dumber’ or ‘The Big Lebowski,’ something that people would be more interested in around a football or basketball game.”

The movies on the channel find their way to Pitt’s closed-circuit cable system through the services of Residence Life Cinema, a nontheatrical (not servicing movie theaters) video-distribution and licensing company. If it’s a movie on channel 3, it comes from their library.

Part of “the world’s largest nontheatrical distributor of motion pictures for public performance,” according to its website, Residence Life Cinema offers films from studios like Paramount, Columbia and HBO, providing access to “approximately 16,000 movie titles” in addition to other programming.

“It’s just like going to Red Box really,” said Office of Residence Life administrative assistant Rosemary Natale. According to Natale, Residence Life Cinema first “provides us with a sample listing of movies that we might want to rent. We rent the [movies we decide to show] and are allowed access to them for a certain period of time.”

The process that those movies go through to get on Pitt’s television sets is a bit more complicated than simply slipping in a DVD, however.

“They send me a hard-drive-type cassette,” Natale said. Each month she brings the 10-15 movies and other programs on the hard drive to the channel’s computer system in Mervis Hall where they’re uploaded for the next month’s viewing.

“And once it’s finished I take it down and mail it back,” she said.

In addition to Hollywood movies, Pitt TV also regularly broadcasts educational programs aimed at college audiences.

“They’re kind of droll, but they get the message out,” Natale said. “They deal with alcohol awareness, hazing, sexual assault, being smart and safe on campus and being green … we get all kinds of PSAs along with the movie choices.”

Residence Life Cinema also supplies Pitt TV with discussion guides to contextualize some of their films and other materials, in order to help RAs make an event out of them. Watching movies together is something Residence Life has promoted for years, for all types of programming.

“We often have movie or TV programs,” Wellen said. “One program a friend of mine did was a ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ party where they sutured a banana while watching ‘Grey’s.’”

Activities like this might even be advertised on Pitt TV.

Between the scheduled programs on channel 3, the “empty” space serves to promote campus events — fundraisers, movie nights, etc. — both on the channel itself and in the William Pitt Union.

By going to the Pitt TV website, student organizations can e-mail the station and not only have their ad air before and after movies, but also have it appear on the interconnected televisions that line the Union.

Though anyone can observe the Union’s televisions, you need to live in a residence hall to get the closed-circuit channel 3.

“I’ve been living in residence halls for my entire college experience and watching the Pitt movie channel since,” Hein said. “I have a lot of friends that live off campus and complain about it … they’re like, ‘What do you mean you get to watch that!’”

Students off-campus can’t do much, but those in the residence halls have a say in the programming.

“We get 96 movies [a year], so we are restricted in some of the movies that we show,” Natale said. “ But we’re always open for suggestions.”