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UT inks deal with Documentary Channel
Okay, if you’re not a Dish Network subscriber (and aren’t planning to become one) you can probably skip this:
The University of Texas at Austin Documentary Center has formed a partnership with The Documentary Channel (available in our area only to Dish Network subscribers), which will now have exclusive U.S. rights to broadcast works from the school’s documentary film students. The films will be broadcast on The Documentary Channel’s “DOC U,” a platform for student work, during the first quarter of 2010, according to a University press release. The rights for each film will extend for 18 months.
More from the release:
The first four films to be broadcast are: “The Cockroach Project” (Ruth Fertig); “Dreams in All Sizes” (Christina Kim); “Pay Dirt” (Berndt Mader); and “A Casebook on Remote Viewing” (Anthony Penta). All four films were created in Radio-TV-Film classes and selected by a panel of Radio-TV-Film faculty and The Documentary Channel programmers.
“The Documentary Channel staff is extremely impressed with the high level of professionalism and innovation of the University of Texas student documentaries we screened,” said Kate Pearson, senior vice president of programming for The Documentary Channel. “We are looking forward to continuing our collaboration with the UT Documentary Center in selecting outstanding student documentaries for future national broadcasts.”
At the end of the spring 2010 semester, additional University of Texas at Austin student documentaries will be selected to be telecast on The Documentary Channel.
“Few people know how much work and energy go into making a documentary. And short documentaries have limited distribution channels” said Ellen Spiro, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin Documentary Center, which is training the next generation of non-fiction filmmakers and photographers. “Having your film seen by an audience of millions lends a certain level of credibility to a filmmaker’s work and—most importantly—brings the films to an audience.”
It seems as if the channel is trying to increase that audience. A quick peek at the DOC Web site reveals a petition to bring the programming to DirecTV subscribers, which would effectively double its number of viewers.
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