Soap operas, satires, and other TV programming created by college students has long gone unseen, for lack of ways to distribute the shows. Now, with the Open Student Television Network (OSTN), an Internet-based TV network launched in 2005, college-created TV shows, many of high quality, have a chance to reach a wide audience.
OSTN, the Wall Street Journal explains, “solves a big problem confronting campus television curriculums: Students are making more and more shows, but individual colleges don’t have enough programs to build true TV schedules. That makes it hard to develop much of a regular audience even if campuses do have a distribution system. By aggregating offerings from different schools—in essence syndicating college shows—there is more than enough content to fill a network.”