Some students complain that Duke Television does not provide adequate cable service, either in quality or in channel selection.
When juniors Yousef Mian and Andy Kanderian purchased the centerpiece of their West Campus dorm room—a 51-inch HDTV television—their expectations were high.
“We had been saving up for a while,” Mian said. “It was about $600 a person.”
But when the Keohane Quadrangle residents wired their gargantuan screen for Duke Television, the University’s cable service, they suddenly knew no emotion but disappointment.
Mian said the sheer size of his screen magnifies flaws in DTV’s cable feed, making the image difficult to view.
“We didn’t expect the cable to be this bad,” Mian said. “There’s something flickering across the screen constantly.”
David Menzies, marketing manager for the Office of Information Technology, said Mian’s problem can be attributed to any number of things, such as a faulty cable connection, an amplifier in need of adjustment or the presence of a video game adapter. He also said DTV is in compliance with the same FCC regulations that all commercial cable companies follow.
“Larger TVs have the general tendency to show more graininess than smaller sets due to the expansion of video information over a larger area,” Menzies wrote in an e-mail. “As the diagonal size of the screen gets larger, the number of vertical lines stays the same. To make up the difference in size the vertical lines get thicker, making the image appear grainy if viewed closely.”
Other common complaints about DTV are its cost and limited channel line-up. DTV’s basic cable package includes access to a total of 49 channels for $32 per month. Senior Blas Catalani, a resident of Kilgo Quad, is considering drastic action.
“For $40 per month, I can afford to hang a dish out my window and get 200-something channels, and just pull the dish in at night when I don’t want to get service,” Catalani said.
In defense of DTV’s channel line-up, Menzies said it is impossible for DTV to offer any more channels as the service is already operating at maximum channel capacity.
Duke students are also aware of the fact that their friends at peer institutions pay much less for cable, which they say exacerbates their frustration with DTV. Undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for example, pay much less for cable than Duke students. A fee of $90 is built into their housing dues each semester and that charge covers their cable television and their broadband Internet access. Tar Heel students have 76 channels to choose from in the basic package—almost 30 more than what DTV offers.
Last year, Campus Council suggested a similar policy for Duke students that had the potential to save students hundreds of dollars on cable television. The student legislators submitted a resolution to Residence Life and Housing Services calling for a plan to bundle the service fee with room rental rates. The objective was to create a higher consumption rate of cable service so that its price could be driven down.
The suggestion never made it past the desk of Eddie Hull, executive director of housing services and dean of residence life, because he said he felt uncomfortable imposing the service on students who do not want it.
But off-campus students, on the other hand, have freed themselves from DTV’s monopoly. Charlie Korschun, a junior who is living in Partners Place this semester, is ecstatic about his Time Warner On Demand digital cable.
“This on-demand stuff may be the end of my life as a productive person,” Korschun said. “There are like a billion channels!”
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