Montclair State University Builds A Streaming Service

At first glance, it looks like one of the big, something-for-everybody streaming services.

Films? Check.

Glitzy comedies? Check.

News and documentaries? Check.

Sports — both games and up-close-and-personal profiles? Check.

The first giveaway that this isn’t Netflix? When you realize that the median age of the talents, and most of the actors and subjects is generally less than 21 and that it’s totally free. It’s called Hawk Plus (hawkplus.tv) and it may be the first student-focused university streaming service in the country. It’s the newest idea to come out of Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media, and it has just started on its mission to prepare students for the streaming world they will soon be entering.

The idea was borne out of frustration, a conversation and a realization.

The frustration: As a local and network news executive-turned-professor, I was frustrated that my new home at New Jersey’s Montclair State had the most modern facilities of any media school in the country — but no legacy TV station (like the University of Missouri’s KOMU Columbia) to give students a real hands-on experience. The university has a vibrant student-run newspaper, an award-winning radio station, an Emmy-award winning weekly newscast that streams on cable access and a number of partnerships — but no TV station.

The conversation: That frustration led to a conversation with the School’s director, Dr. Keith Strudler. He accurately argued that our students, for the most part, didn’t consume legacy television, but lived on their phones. Get over it, Effron.

The realization: One night, while looking for my next binge-worthy show — aimlessly going from Hulu to Amazon Prime to Disney+ to Peacock — I realized the solution was staring me right in the face:

We needed our own streaming service.

Strudler and I embarked on a self-education mission. We discovered that there are dozens of white label streaming services all around the world that would like to build yours. The cost of entry is typically cheap. It’s like buying a printer. It’s not the printer that keeps you shelling out; it’s the ink. Similarly, in streaming, it’s the costs associated with hosting hundreds of hours, the cost of closed captioning, etc.

For businesses getting into streaming, that’s less of a problem. They go into it to make money. For a media and communications school at a public university, we had different goals in mind.

First, we wanted one-stop-shopping for all of the great media our students turned out: sports, news and films and documentaries. We wanted to showcase the professors who teach here and the special events we regularly host. We wanted a resource for parents, alumni and donors. We wanted to give our media students the opportunity to actually help build and run a thriving streaming network. We wanted to branch out and give other Montclair State schools the opportunity to stream their best stuff.

Fortunately, after sitting through countless online presentations, we connected with Triple-B Media, a company that owns and operates streaming services and networks such as MotoAmerica TV, Boxing TV and Billiard. Triple-B had recently created a technology group called Streamstak that not only housed live and on demand solutions for its own channels but was interested in branching out into other verticals.

It was a perfect marriage: The company — a fast-growing startup in the space — was looking to break into the university world. It needed a fast-on-their feet partner, and we needed someone to take a chance on us.

Brendan Canning, the co-founder and chief commercial officer of Triple-B Media, says: “Colleges and universities produce a wealth of great content day in and day out, but it is often difficult to find and present to their stakeholders. We felt Streamstak offered a great opportunity for Montclair to create a unified streaming platform that aggregated all of its content into one hub.”

We brought on student interns, and we all learned together. We came up with existing streams of strong content: the weekly Montclair News Lab newscast; the daily morning show from our radio station, WMSC; weekly sports coverage from our newest media platform, The Red Hawk Sports Network; a regular show highlighting student films, concerts from the Cali School of Music and more.

To that, we added special programming events: A one-hour special, Focus: Disruption—Moving Forward, which explored the innovative ways students are thriving during a pandemic that isn’t ending; New Orleans — The Raging Storms, a student-reported documentary on how climate change and racial justice are intertwined; The Scholar and Production Awards, which is our school’s answer to the Academy Awards, except it’s under an hour, it’s consistently funny and nobody gets slapped.

“In academia, we often focus too much on teaching to the present or even the past,” Strudler says. “In a field like ours, we have to be vigilant in looking towards the future, and our new streaming service will be a signature step towards that orientation.”

For the student interns who helped build the site, the experience rivaled anything they learned in a classroom. Joseph Giordano was involved from Day One. He says, “Hawk Plus allowed me the opportunity to expand my horizons in the media industry. I learned how to manage content for a streaming network and more importantly, how to work and manage a team in a professional atmosphere.”

This spring in our Hawk Communications agency course, students helped with the soft launch of the network. Under the direction of public relations professor and former sports industry exec Keith Green, PR, strategic communication and business students learn how to use a variety of tactics to promote businesses, products and services.

“It’s rare that students are on the ground floor to launch anything, so this was a great experience for them,” Green says. “Hawk+ was a perfect way for students to sharpen their publicity and other tactical skills and learn more about streaming and its importance to our school’s internal and external audiences.”

The missing piece for all of this is now being built: a nimble digital production studio that will be fully automated, operating from a laptop loaded with production software. It will allow students to quickly go from concept to production to live streaming.

Coming up: A hard launch in the fall at homecoming and an expansion of the intern program to allow more students to learn the very real skills associated with running a streaming channel including how to program, mark, sustain and grow it.

For me, part of being a media and communication college professor is working with students to pass on my experiences running large news organizations and managing creative endeavors. This is a fresh experience. I am learning every day from my digital- native students, from the developers at Streamstak and from the trial-and-error process in trying to figure out what the best practices are for a university-based streaming service in 2022. I’ve learned not to fear failure. It’s the only way we continue to learn.

Mark Effron is a professor of journalism and director of the Montclair News Lab at The School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University.