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July 26, 2010, 07:15 PM ET

Princeton U. Decides to Shut Down Online Collection of Policy Videos

Princeton University announced today that it plans to shut down University Channel, a Web service that streams videos of public-policy lectures, citing financial reasons.

The online audio and video service, started in 2005, provides lectures by prominent scholars on political affairs. The Web site offers hundreds of videos and audio recordings from 47 college campuses, including some outside the United States. The service also provides academic programming to 121 public television operations.

The University Channel Web site will shut down on November 3, according to a message sent to the channel's e-mail announcement list, signed by Rebecca Anderson, a spokesperson for Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

"While we have decided that it no longer makes financial sense for Princeton to host the UChannel, we still believe that noncommercial, quality educational programming is an important part of the World-Wide Web," Ms. Anderson wrote. "Therefore, in the coming months, we will be pursuing options to ensure that many of the Woodrow Wilson School lectures and conferences are posted on our school’s Web site, and we hope that you will do the same at your institution."

Officials at the Wilson School could not be reached for further comment.

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Comments

1. performance_expert2 - July 28, 2010 at 03:15 am

"Princeton said its investment pool fell to $12.6 billion on June 30, down from $16.3 billion a year earlier"

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB125423867747249621.html

2. performance_expert2 - July 28, 2010 at 03:18 am

article if from '09. Apparently all (?) of the big endowed schools suffered a 20-29% drop in endowment value at the conclusion of the BushCo era.

3. performance_expert2 - July 28, 2010 at 03:19 am

(having a serious problem with typos lately) Article "is" from '09..

4. paievoli - July 28, 2010 at 07:05 am

This is why schools have to look at alternative revenue streams... they have to come to realize where the non-profit and and alternative institution starts. If not they are going to be cutting back any form of advancement. It is very simple - advancement costs money.... and they have to start to find a way - non-intrusively - that generates alternative revenue streams.

5. bradleyhockey - July 28, 2010 at 08:30 am

Decisions are made to appear "advanced", "political" or demonstrate "outreach" unfortunately the window dressing costs money- sadly important projects such as this suffer in order to maintain the other expensive window dressing programs. Dropping this program is unfortunate-surely there are other places to go to make cutbacks-

6. cshunt312 - July 28, 2010 at 09:44 am

Princeton (and other universities) can upload these videos onto their channel on YouTube (regular and .edu), which would actually make them available to a wider audience. They can also leverage their other social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Facebook and even their website) to promote the videos periodically. Rather than viewing this as a loss, I see this as a pragmatic, digital-era cost-saving measure that can also increase the opportunities to share this valuable content.

7. wmartin46 - July 28, 2010 at 09:55 am

Articles like this aren't very helpful unless they provide readers key data, such as the yearly budget for running this sort of operation, and the traffic the service generated. Other information, such as why there are budget problems would be helpful.

If there was little interest in this service, then paying for servers and bandwidth makes little sense. On the other hand, if there was a lot of interest, then finding alternative funding would seem to be something that Admins should be requested to do.

Youtube is getting about 5B hits a month, so somebody is watching video out there.

8. 11272784 - July 28, 2010 at 11:15 am

If they can't afford to do this, they aren't doing it right. There aer very low-cost alternatives they evicently haven't explored.

9. johnadkins - July 29, 2010 at 04:37 pm

As stated above, put them on Youtube and enjoy the status and exposure they are given while meeting their mission of the free dessimination of the information. Win-win!