WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The days scrolling through Netflix and queuing up a movie in a lecture hall are coming to an end at Purdue University.

A pair of experiments during the fall and spring semesters – both of which blocked the most popular streaming sites from Purdue’s broadband connections in Purdue’s biggest lecture halls – worked so well that filtering out streaming video and gaming platforms will be the new standard for all classrooms across the West Lafayette campus.

By the time students return from spring break, on March 18, access in classrooms will be blocked for bandwidth-eating movie and TV services Netflix and Hulu, the Steam gaming site, music services iTunes, Pandora and iHeartRadio, and Apple updates. Special areas in all academic buildings will be set up to access those sites.

Julie Kercher-Updike, Purdue’s deputy chief information officer, said a university surveyed other schools and believe it’s the first in the Big Ten to go this way.

“This is aimed at what’s considered recreational streaming,” said Julie Kercher-Updike, Purdue’s deputy chief information officer. “It’s really about making it so streaming doesn’t take away from giving academic resources first priority.”

The move has been a year in the making, starting with a plea from Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

In February 2018, Daniels went to faculty leaders on the University Senate, asking professors for help in getting a handle on Purdue’s broadband service, which had doubled in price and seen five times the consumption in four years. Daniels said he wasn’t concerned, as much, about use of Purdue Air Link – known as PAL, the university’s wireless service for students, staff and faculty – in residence halls or other places they live and congregate on campus when out of class.

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Instead, he came with a one-week study that tracked Wi-Fi traffic in Lilly Hall Room 1105 and Electrical Engineering Building Room 129 – two of Purdue’s largest lecture halls, with at least 445 seats apiece – where competition for bandwidth was at a premium in confined spaces.

The tally? Just 4 percent of the data was being downloaded from Purdue sites or what the university’s IT department categorized as “academic.” Another 34 percent went for a category deemed “likely non-academic,” including a handful of social media sites, streaming video platforms and first-person gaming services.

The rest was called “likely mixed,” split between Google, Apple, Amazon and data caches where the university keeps a list of updates and applications. Daniels told professors he had his doubts about much of that “likely mixed” Wi-Fi traffic was actually devoted to class discussion.

“Generously defined,” Daniels said at the time, “very few of the sites being visited, in the class period in those classrooms, were academic. … When it’s purely recreational, especially during class hours, I think it raises some questions.”

Purdue tested its first solution during the first 10 weeks of the fall 2018 semester. Purdue blocked the heaviest streaming services in four lecture halls, in Class of 1950, Lilly Hall, Electrical Engineering and Wetherill Lab. (Those streaming sites were still available for anyone using a personal data plan.)

Purdue waited for the complaints, installing a “splash page” that popped up whenever someone tried to use the university’s network to get to Netflix, Hulu or any of the other filtered sites during the pilot project. The page included details about why a show wasn’t available, along with an email address to lodge gripes.

“They didn’t really happen,” Kercher-Updike said.

The pressure on Purdue’s network in those halls – which already were maxxed out on the number of Wi-Fi access points – fell, said Mark Sonstein, executive director of IT infrastructure services at Purdue.

Sonstein said he compared bandwidth use in Lilly Hall’s Room 1105 during the sixth week of both the spring 2018 semester and the fall 2018 semester. He said usage dropped from 129 terabytes during that week in spring 2018 to 5 terabytes for the comparable week in fall 2018. Some of that drop-off, he said, could be attributed to students who once sat just outside the lecture hall, waiting for class, who have moved elsewhere to get an unfiltered feed for their phones and laptops.

More telling, Sonstein said, was use of Blackboard, Purdue’s site for online assignments, grades and assorted course materials. During that week in the spring 2018 semester, Blackboard was at No. 78 among the top 100 sites used in the Lilly lecture hall. In the fall 2018 semester, Blackboard was in the top 10, Sonstein said.

For the spring 2019 semester, Purdue tried a second experiment, this time in Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering. Purdue created “PAL 3.0,” a network dedicated for Forney classrooms that filtered out streaming services. A second service, “Purdue Recreational Link,” was available in designated spaces outside lecture halls and what Purdue determined to be an academic space in Forney.

Professors, in all tests, still had hard-wired, unfiltered access to Purdue's network.

Once again, Sonstein said, the complaints haven’t come.

The PAL 3.0 and Purdue Recreational Link will be installed, tested and deployed the week of March 11, during spring break.

Hard-wired connections across campus will not be affected by the filters. And the wireless filtering will be done, even in classrooms, between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. weekdays, during academic hours.

Michael Graham, a junior studying engineering, said he had a class in the Class of 1950 lecture hall last semester. If the Netflix ban had any effect in his class, he said he didn’t notice it.

“I’m not in there to watch movies or anything,” Graham said. “I really don’t know anyone else who does, either. … So, I guess I don’t have a problem with it.”

Sonstein said the university will spend the coming weeks prepping students and faculty that the change is coming. (“And that Purdue Recreational Link is a real thing and is safe to log into,” Sonstein said.)

Sonstein said the classroom filters won’t necessarily save the university a lot of money. And the new system might need to be tweaked if other streaming sites get heavy use during class hours. Social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, and shopping giant Amazon, won’t be blocked.

The biggest complaint, Sonstein said, might come from students who line hallways, just outside classrooms, before passing period who find they can’t log on to Hulu or Netflix.

“That could cause some angst,” Sonstein said. ““We’re going to find out. But we just have not seen the push back we thought we would see.”

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.