WSU Housing Services and partner Campus Televideo are offering WSU students TiVo on campus. Students who are interested will pay a discounted rate of $125 for one year of service, and will receive a free 80-hour Series2DT TiVo.

The new option has been a long time in the making, said Bob Tattershall, director of Housing and Dining Services.

“We’ve been wishing to have this option for a while,” Tattershall said. “As many know, WSU doesn’t have a TV Guide type channel and this decision is partly in response to that.” TiVo allows the user to record any show whenever it is on as well as pause, instant replay, rewind and employ slow motion on shows or live TV. Additional services can include download-able movies and back episodes of TV shows.

I’m sure this will be popular with the students. And it is good for TiVo – they have a low churn rate, so students who start using TiVo in college will be more likely to stick with TiVo outside of school. (Same reason companies like Apple have traditionally supported schools with hardware and software.)

“These are all the standard features a person would normally get with TiVo,” he said. “But it comes at a discounted price which is good for the students.” Junior sociology major John Togiai said he is looking forward to the service.

“I like this innovation a lot,” Togiai said. “It gives students the opportunity to keep track of their favorite shows while they are off working hard and being studious.” Campus Televideo was founded in 1984 and provides telecommunication services to colleges and universities including satellite delivered cable television.

Since Campus Televideo works with over 135 schools, it will be interesting to see if they promote this deal on other campuses as well. It does seem to be available to all of their users as the deal is linked off of their website. It looks like it started on September 18, 2007 and runs through December 18, 2007 – while supplies last. (More evidence, IMHO, that TiVo is selling off existing stocks of the S2DT and the product will be going away.) You do need to enter an email address from one of the valid schools – but they seem to be doing the validation in JavaScript. If you enter any email address from one of the schools you get past that. I’ve included the relevant function below, just because.

See the full article in The Daily Evergreen, WSU’s student paper. Thanks to Dave Zatz for the tip.

The school checking JavaScript. I like how they try to hide it buy giving the file a .html extension and putting the redirect on the first line. Cute.
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