The University has expanded its online video presence with the creation of the Princeton YouTube channel.
The Princeton channel on the popular online video sharing website features content highlighting academic research, the University's groundbreaking financial aid program, student-made works and other topics. Videos are added to the Princeton channel by the University's Office of Communications.
The new YouTube channel follows the February launch of the redesigned University home page, which features multimedia technology showcasing the accomplishments of students, faculty and staff. The home page, which also is managed by the communications office, prominently features video and other multimedia tools to visually demonstrate the creative and intellectually stimulating nature of life on campus.
The University's online video presence also has expanded through the availability of UChannel on iTunesU, the academic section of the iTunes music store. UChannel is a multimedia collection of public affairs lectures from Princeton and other institutions around the world.
The new UChannel site on iTunesU features nearly 1,500 audio and video recordings of public lectures on topics ranging from economics to environment and foreign policy, all from a consortium of universities led by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. UChannel schools present these lectures as a public service, so all downloads from the site are free.
The UChannel project has been collecting public affairs recordings since 2005 and offers daily updates on its website. Also available through YouTube, Facebook and cable television outlets, UChannel recorded nearly 22 million hits with more than 665,000 unique visitors from September 2007 through August 2008.
In addition to video, the Office of Information Technology has created an online archive of audio podcasts of hundreds of lectures and other events held at the University. The podcast website, which debuted in 2006, also is available on iTunes. In the last academic year, nearly 128 million podcasts were downloaded. Seventy percent of those downloads came from the United States, while 30 percent came from other countries. Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and China rank as the countries with the highest numbers of downloads outside the United States.
