Although the majority of campus may not know what goes on in BTV's office on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center, we can all rest assured that the audio-visual club is hard at work. While BTV has faced financial and personnel deficits in the past, the station will soon reap the fruits of Avi Swerdlow's '10 labor. Swerdlow, who joined BTV last fall, took the office of president last year and is re-energizing and restructuring the club, helping train new members and putting in place a new production strategy. Instead of creating one big production, Swerdlow and the other executive board members decided to schedule as many small programs as possible. The 10 winning proposals, currently in the preproduction and editing processes, are set to air later this semester or early next semester. The shows will cover a variety of genres, primarily comedy, cooking and news.Brandeis TV-watchers may be familiar with the station's current offerings on channel 65 (that is to say, the Windows screensaver interspersed with videos of Jimmy Carter's visit last spring). Don't say goodbye to the Windows logo just yet. BTV's restructuring process includes an overhaul regarding the way the club will deliver content to viewers (which mirrors a growing trend in the TV industry at large).

"We want to make it a YouTube kind of thing," Swerdlow said. "[The BTV Web site] is a combination of social networking and YouTube. It has enormous advantage over a channel, [providing] instantaneous access to our content, on and off campus." The cable channel 65 and IPTV, an online program that simulcasts what airs on channel 65 as well as a few other cable networks, only work on the Brandeis network.

The club hasn't decided what role the channel will play in the future. "We'll use the channel for live events," Swerdlow said.

Vice President Eva Cataldo '10 indicated that the Web site will not preclude the use of the channel. "Once we have content, we'll put it on the TV station," she said.

BTV's Web site is fully functional, but Swerdlow and Cataldo are working on fine-tuning the site's appearance before publicizing it with premiere parties and e-mails. There are currently five videos up, but Cataldo plans to upload better-quality versions before officially launching the site. The videos' quality will be "not like the fuzzy YouTube look," she says.

Cataldo is no stranger to the YouTube process: She and some friends created the two-minute "Sherman Commercial" last year. "In a week, we had 1,000 hits. It spread like wildfire," she said. The commercial, which was created as a class assignment, takes a sarcastic view of the dining hall's public image; in the clip, a group of students pine for Sherman food before rapturously running to the front entrance.

BTV's program for the rest of this year is made up of much more ambitious than parodic commercials. According to Swerdlow, a cooking show is already in the editing stages, while nine other shows, including a sketch comedy show, a sitcom, a sports commentary show, a music video show and a political satire show, are in preproduction (that is, their writer/directors are currently working on scripts and filming).

Lynn Guthrie '09 began the cooking show as a segment on satirical news show The Beat, which ran in spring 2006. When Guthrie came to Brandeis in fall 2004, "Brandeis television was kind of a big deal." According to Guthrie, BTV held a premiere of a sitcom titled Residence Strife in Cholmondeley's, and the coffeehouse was packed with BTV fans. Since then, however, the club has faced the graduation of important members, as well as "a shifting campus community"-Brandeis students have become more attached to their computers, at the expense of their televisions. Guthrie says people have asked her if they can watch BTV on their computers.

"It makes sense; how often do most people at Brandeis sit in front of a TV?" adds Ari Jadwin '10, writer and director of the BTV sketch comedy show currently titled All We Got Is Stew.

"I don't think it's any surprise that people don't watch the channel on TV," said Arun Narayanan '10, who is putting together a sitcom called Slice and 'Deis. Narayanan's show is about "a bunch of kids at Brandeis. It's a Friends kind of thing, but without the drama." The show, which he plans to start filming this weekend, will be shot on and around campus. "I just want to capture Brandeis humor," he says. The show will star Ted Levin '10 and Gdaly Berlin '10, both of Sherman Commercial fame.

The club members I spoke to were uniformly positive about the future of BTV and the success of the Web site. Though they may have little to show for the work they've done so far, the producers of the new shows are hard at work.

Guthrie perhaps has the best pitch for the club's future. "If you're going to sit around watching video clips on your computer, why not watch some from BTV?