04/06/2025
WHAT A YEAR! We have so many thanks to give, so much to celebrate, and so much to look forward to in the future! Let's dig in to some notables from the 2024-2025 school year!
First off, to all the TV Studio students in class this year, and all of those who helped film or anything for TV Studio I just want to say THANK YOU! The students did a phenomenal job this year, and I always tell them at the beginning of the year I want them to push the needle forward. How can we build upon and be better than what TV Studio did last year? What new innovative ideas can we come up with? This group stepped up to the challenge and pushed it further this year than it's ever gone. All the TV Studio students before them and all the equipment that has been accumulated has helped get to this point. Now, they are in turn setting the bar for the group next year and helping them push the needle forward.
Next I want to say a huge thanks to all of our sponsors. This was the first year we sold sponsorships for live broadcasting events and our community really stepped up to help out! To be able to create the things that we do in TV Studio, whether it be the live broadcasts, video contests, short series, podcasts, newscasts, etc it takes equipment to make that happen. It's expensive and the opportunities this class has had each of the last four years has just continually gotten better and better and a lot of that has to do with the capability that we keep getting to. We will keep pushing to grow in this way with the class and to everyone that sponsored our broadcasts I say a huge thanks. More info and stats on broadcasts will be below.
Next I want to say a big congrats to all the students who stepped up to compete in video contests this year. We had an incredible amount of success. The first contest was the CTE Show Me Learning That Works contest. We made this a project in our TV Studio, Intro TV Studio, and Broadcasting classes. Students had to choose a Careeer and Technical Education class/program here at our school and make a 30 second video that fit the criteria. The teams that created the Intro TV Studio, Floriculture, and FTA videos were all selected as winners that put $2,000 for EACH winner back into the TV Studio program. TV Studio was fortunate to be able to put $6,000 back into the program this way.
Congratulations to Timmy Winterbauer our most recent winner as it was just announced this week! He competed in the Wayfinder Preparing For Life After High School video contest and he was able to win second place. This particular contest awarded the creator of the video a cash prize and Timmy was able to win $500 cash for himself and some Wayfinder swag. Congrats Timmy!
We also had a team of 3 students compete in the Latest Generation Film Contest where they created a video talking about the impact that the now Lakeside Book Company all the way back to Custom Printing has had on our community. This was the biggest contest that any students entered this year and even though they weren't selected as a winner they created an amazing documentation of our largest employer here in Owensville.
While we are talking about Lakeside Book Company, I would like to extend a huge thank you to them as well as there were two separate donations totaling $4,800 from Lakeside Book Company this year to TV Studio. This played a huge role in being able to purchase gear to greatly improve our live broadcasts to the community.
Tim Oehrke is another TV Studio supporter who has donated several times over the last few years and has really helped our program grow and get to where it is today as well. Thank you not only for the support Tim, but also for tuning in to most of our live broadcasts and giving us feedback on what you see in our broadcasts to help us improve!
One of my favorite things we do every year in TV Studio is our short series projects. This year we actually had two short series in class for the first time ever. Both of the groups did great in their own ways and created something that will last forever. The Dutchmen's Game ended up being a 5 episode short series that totaled just at 20 minutes long with the plotline that semi-follows the classic board game CLUE. Insider was a short series that was 6 episodes long totaling an hour and 8 minutes that followed a plotline of an alien student at OHS who was being hunted down by the CIA. I cannot explain the challenge of creating something like this. It spans the entire school year and becomes a passion project for sure. These students made it happen and we always celebrate the short series at the end of the year by creating movie posters that will hang on the TV Studio walls for years to come. They are precious memories and now they join Breakout and Outbreak in TV Studio lore for the rest of time.
This year we also worked closer with our Special Education Department than we ever have before! We have students from Mr. Amato's classes coming in to participate in our live weekly newscasts whether that is being in the newscast or helping with running it behind the scenes. Additionally, we had Caleb Stoker and Carter Sellers working on Super Dutch and Dino Carter which are shows that are extremely loved by students, staff, and community. The plan is continue working to offer these opportunities to our students!
Lastly, I love to talk about stats and this year we had some pretty insane stats. I'll start with the live broadcasts.
This year we spent 94 hours and 38 minutes live broadcasting different sporting events and graduation at OHS. When I say 94+ hours live broadcasting I mean that is how much video footage there is of these broadcasts. That doesn't include all the planning and setup. These live broadcasts now exist as videos on our OHS TV Studio page that can always be revisited and watched by those who played, their families, and the community as a whole. In total, these live streams received 19,554 views from community members and people tuning in from the visiting teams. Here's where it gets kind of crazy to wrap your head around. The average view duration was 16 minutes. Meaning in total 312,864 minutes were spent watching our TV Studio live streams just this year. In other words, 5,214 hours, or 217 full days. It's insane to think that 217 full days worth of time was consumed watching our live broadcasts this year. To say that the live streams are being utilized would be an understatement. They will be looked back on for years to come as our students go back to watch and relive what those days were like.
In TV Studio class we celebrate milestones in how many subscribers that our YouTube page gets. This year more than doubled what the previous 3 years were able to achieve. Part of that growth is the snowball effect, and part of it is us just learning what it takes to grow subscribers in the current state of YouTube. On this day last year the channel had 1,193 subscribers, and currently the channel sits at 2,398 subscribers. The channel has grown by over 1,200 subscribers this year alone. In addition, the channel hit a million total views this year. Then the channel did even better hitting 1,076,017 total views in this year alone. For reference, we started the year with around 270,000 views.
So where do we go from here? Well, there are a ton of ideas for next year. The one that I think I am most excited about right now is going to be the introduction of the AV (Audio/Video) Club for the entire school. This will give students who aren't able to take TV Studio as a class a chance to still be involved with some of the things that TV Studio does. Additionally, it will give students the opportunity to earn community service hours for NHS, resumes, or anything else they may be attempting to earn hours for. Students who help out with operating a camera or any number of things for our live broadcasts without doing it for a grade will earn those volunteer hours for helping. Additionally, they will be able to compete in video contests that I find and send out to them with the opportunity to earn money/awards for themselves as well.
If I missed anyone in this post in sharing the thanks, please know it was not intentional. I think I have covered the bases here, but it is possible that I have forgotten something. All contributions by students, staff, and community members to our TV Studio program are greatly appreciated!
For anyone who read all of this thanks for caring about OHS TV Studio. From here... ONWARD AND UPWARD!
