Since updating software last fall, Residence Halls Association, or RHA, has gotten positive feedback for its RHA TV On-Demand program. On the RHA website, students can watch up to 20 movies for free each month.
“It’s a great opportunity for students to access movies that are showing on our RHA TV service anywhere on campus as long as they are an on-campus students,” RHA President Kelcey Gapske said. “Say you’re not able to be at your TV, or say you don’t even have a TV and you just have a laptop and access to the Internet. You’re able to kind of use the on-demand services without being locked down to your room or if your without a TV.”
The RHA TV On-Demand program was created in 2010 and is offered to students at no cost for on-campus residents, Gapske said.
Gapske also said there has been a substantial increase in activity since the group updated the program to Swank this academic year. Since updating their software through Swank, movies are now automatically uploaded videos from RHA TV.
The current movies available for students to view include popular recent releases such as Argo, Flight and Looper, as well as classics, such as Rain Man, The Breakfast Club and Space Jam.
The movies selected for the on-demand program are chosen by RHA general assembly members at weekly meetings. Sheets containing videos that are timely are passed out to the board members and they have the opportunity to pick which ones they want to see added. These movies selected are updated on a monthly basis, Gapske said.
But political science freshman Jack Ottenwess still isn’t sold on giving up his $7.99 per month Netflix package in favor of RHA TV On-Demand.
“I just feel more comfortable and I use it all the time so it needs to be reliable,” he said. “I like watching all my shows, and I just feel more comfortable with it because I know more about it.”
RHA has not received a website report for March, but the site got 3,183 hits during February, RHA Director of Technology Nick Zuzow said.
Zuzow added that since the program update he hasn’t received any negative emails towards the program saying the website wouldn’t load, movies would crash or the website not loading correctly.
RHA uses students’ IP addresses to regulate who is eligible to access the movies, Zuzow said.
“When you’re on campus, they have a certain range that they allowed IP addresses that work in their system, so I talked to the MSU (Information Technology) to figure out what that range was and then we conveyed that to Swank and they put the limitations (to) those IP addresses that are in that range,” Zuzow said.
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