At 11 a.m. on Jan. 26, AU TV completed the transition to AU TV-20. AU TV-20 officially launched with a broadcast of the Journalism and Digital Media department’s September 11 documentary “9/11 Remembered.”

With this transition from AU TV to AU TV-20, the JDM department is now in charge of broadcasting on Channel 20 24/7. In order to handle this responsibility, the JDM department has had to make some changes to the content they approve of to be produced and aired on the channel.

According to Tim McCarty, interim chair of the department of Journalism and Digital Media, the department now has to adhere to a broadcast standard; anything that is produced and broadcast by the department has to be appropriate for the community.

The programming for AU TV-20 will be based on what McCarty calls the three As: athletics, academics and arts.

Athletics will include AU athletics and the department is hoping to broadcast local sports of schools that are in Armstrong Cable’s broadcast area.

In the academics category, McCarty hopes to feature more programming such as the sport scandal forum that took place last month as well as feature programming from the different departments within the College of Arts and Sciences.

“With the arts, we have a fantastic music program,” McCarty said. “They have recitals and all kinds of things that we could tape and then broadcast to the community.”

Before the official launch of AU TV-20, McCarty and John Skrada, operations manager for the department of Journalism and Digital Media, spent countless hours during the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas preparing programming for the launch.

The new equipment to broadcast to Channel 20 was installed over winter break. There were over two weeks of testing with the signal to Armstrong and the new equipment to make sure everything would run as efficiently as possible.

“When Armstrong said ‘you are a go,’ we immediately launched the (community) message board and then launched the programming,” McCarty said.

McCarty feels that the launch of AU TV-20 is a win for all parties involved.

“It is a win for the College of Arts and Sciences because our department is within the CAS,” McCarty said. “We see it as part of our mission to promote our college. It is a win for the university because we are now able to promote the university to the community. We also feel that it is a win for the community because now they get to see Ashland news, local high school stuff and all of the three A’s.”