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The students behind Northeastern TV have uploaded over 1,300 videos and built an audience of more than 4,000 followers.
When Northeastern TV began 20 years ago, students created shows that were broadcast onto TVs across the university’s Boston campus.
Today, the idea of watching a live broadcast seems quaint as many people watch content from streaming services. But NUTV has evolved and pivoted to putting its content on YouTube. In doing so, NUTV has created its own streaming service filled with content from short films to regular news updates that can be accessed any time.
“YouTube allows you to really reach beyond just the Northeastern community,” said Armaan Sarao, a third-year media studies and English major who is president of NUTV. “Some of our videos have amassed millions of views, so it’s incredible to see just the reach and the expansion of our video just because it’s on YouTube.”
NUTV pivoted models around the early 2010s after first uploading content to iTunes. Over time, they’ve gradually switched to streaming on YouTube and now have more than 4,000 followers and over 1,300 videos uploaded.
And they’re still growing. This year, NUTV expanded its offerings by filming broadcasts with the cameras in the Shilman TV studio. Before this, students used Sony cameras that many use for home videos.
The cameras in Shilman Hall are broadcast equipment, giving students the chance to work on the type of cameras they might when working in a TV or film studio. They can practice using a teleprompter and a control room that they might use if they were creating a live broadcast.
“It’s a really good learning experience, because there’s a whole control room as well,” said Caitlin Prinos, a fourth-year media and screen studies student involved in NUTV. “Knowing how to do all the cuts, the sound editing, graphics, going to green screens, and directing for live TV is very, very important. It’s a very cool thing that we’re able to do that. I’m really glad we’re doing that because that’s what you’re going to be using when you go out into the real world.”
NUTV has three departments: news, sports and entertainment. NUTV’s news department creates journalistic and nonfiction content, from news packages covering stories from around the campus or the globe. Their regular shows include News Does Reviews, which reviews local establishments, and the Husky Update, a biweekly news show. The news department also recently was part of Student News Live’s election night coverage.
In some ways, the work students are doing for NUTV’s journalism department offers more challenges than a regular news broadcast. Because they don’t have advertisers, they are filling an entire 30-minute news segment with no commercials, said Andrew Longo, a second-year journalism and political science major who serves as NUTV’s news director. But this gives students a chance to really immerse themselves in every part of the producing process.
“We’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing with news,” Longo added. “When I look out at the meetings, I feel like we have a lot of fresh faces … which is really encouraging. We’re pushing that you can do a lot of different things. A lot of people say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be a reporter.’ Well, do you have any interest in sound? Do you have any interest in camera equipment? In editing? Because these are all other things that we need. News is so editing-heavy … so we’re teaching new members how to do that so that they’re brought into the loop.”
Meanwhile, the sports department focuses on campus athletics, shining a light on both Northeastern’s teams and athletes. One of their recurring programs is Sports Not Live, a live sports-oriented sketch comedy show shot in a studio at Shilman. They are also soon releasing a series where Northeastern student athletes interview each other about their sports.
The entertainment department deals with all things creative. Their members produce short films, music videos, feature length films and reality shows.
Rachel Solomon, a fourth-year communication and media studies major who serves as an executive producer for the project, said due to student interest, the department has strayed away from scheduled programming and more into independent projects.
“(This) has led to a lot of really incredible short films from a bunch of different individuals just trying to pursue their creative passions,” she said. “We have projects that are a lot more serious, and we develop large crews around those projects with concrete roles. But we also have projects that are sillier and more loose. So it’s really just whatever people want to do, they volunteer to do and they help out.”
Highlights include a comedic Halloween-themed short film Solomon and a crew helped produce and an upcoming short film with a full crew that is shooting on location around Boston.
The students in NUTV see the benefit in producing their work for YouTube. Many of them don’t have cable and point out that even shows that do air live, like “Saturday Night Live,” bring in viewers through streaming after the fact. In maintaining a similar model, where people can watch when they want, the students feel they’re better prepared for working in the industry.
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“Most events are streamed somewhere for free,” Sarao says. “You can watch the Oscars for free. Most of the time you can watch the Super Bowl streamed. All the big events that you usually want to catch on live TV usually are streamable. Having (our content) on YouTube makes it just so much more accessible, and kind of puts us in that same concept of streaming, where there’s not scheduled dates where things need to come out.
“The industry right now, the way content is being pushed out is so different than how it used to be, because it’s not like they’re filling time slots in the same way that cable used to for prestige television. It’s just seasons come out whenever they come out, and the whole system comes out once. I think doing stuff on YouTube is kind of similarly in line with that, where people can just scroll through our videos and pick out whatever they want to watch on a given day,” Solomon added. “It’s almost our own little streaming service.
It allows their work to live on the Internet, making it easier to put in a portfolio or share with friends and family.
“When it comes to short films, the mindset is that you’re either posting those online so that you can try to get people to see them and then hopefully get the traction that you’re looking for, or you’re holding them close and only submitting them to festivals and one or the other,” Solomon said.
“But I think putting stuff on YouTube really helps people to be able to share it with anyone that they want. You work on something really hard and want to show your distant family. If it were on a news feed or on a broadcast channel that they weren’t connected to, they would never be able to see that. But because it’s on YouTube, you can send it to whoever you want. You can send it around the world. And I think that’s really special.”