Pop Up Politics

Live debates are a terrible way to vet a president, but it's a tradition we appear to be stuck with. One way to improve them, and political speeches generally, would be a more integrated method of fact checking, perhaps along the lines of VH1's Pop Up Video format. In addition to the videos, a website with verifiable fact checking sources would be required for true credibility. There should be more than facts, though, as keeping it entertaining through humor will help more people stay engaged. I believe this is the driving force behind why Daily Show viewers have hisotrically had a high level of news knowledge: because they watch consistently. The popularity of that (I submitted the suggestion to them in 2008 and again in 2012, but never received a response) or a similar program would help offset diminished interest stemming from the fact that the political events would have already aired and they'd have the resources to achieve a rapid turnaround time. 

New Show Rating Booster System

An ounce of viewership is worth a pound of petitioning

A campaign to revive a cancelled show is like waiting until cancer is at stage IV before treating it. Much better to avoid the situation altogether by identifying good shows and spreading the word to fans who would like such content, as well as notifying them about schedule changes (an often identified reason new shows fail to attract a viewership). The mechanics of such a system are fairly straightforward, being similar to standard recommendation systems (although critic rated techniques like those employed by Clerkdogs (now defunct) could identify matches sooner which matters a lot in this context), and it would be a much better use of their energies. Since shows do compete for time slots and production resources, it's a lot like a political campaign, and getting out your base can definitely yield a disproportionate influence. Such an approach would still only be a bandaid on an inherently flawed production system, but that's another issue.

Broadcast Based Personalized Video Distribution System

Netflix's recent push to encourage streaming only video plans has brought up concerns that ISPs may not be able to provide adequate bandwidth. This made me recall a post I did on my private blog some years ago about reusing our broadcast infrastructure to provide personalized video viewing (or at least the bulk of it). It is loosely modeled on pay per view techniques, but assumes every subscriber has a DVR (digital video recorder) and eliminates channels as we know them (except perhaps for real time things such as news) and just considers the stations as data streams. Users select which shows and movies they would like and then a central program would determine the best way to send the shows over the available stations so that the viewers' DVRs could record them, accounting for collisions. As an option, viewers could pay more to get a higher priority in the queue if their content is more unusual. Optionally, a recommendation system could be employed to gather content when free capacity is available (it would be cleared from the DVR's drive automatically if space was later needed). Commercials should be eliminated from program downloads, but could be spliced in afterwards, allowing them to be varied or omitted altogether if a higher price is paid. This requires very little new infrastructure and if direct data is delivered, the hardware could be cheaper than traditional DVRs, by eliminating the video capture elements as some satellite boxes already do. Adding a secondary tuner is also common, and would allow for more flexibility with regard to scheduling. Of course, once all the content is digital, many other optimizations are possible, such as interleaving of programs, or more frequent broadcasts of the beginning of a show (enabling the rest to be downloaded in the background as the first part is being viewed). Only a very low speed connection would be needed to upload show requests, so dial up would be adequate for areas without high speed internet. Another advantage of this approach is that all times are equally valued, as the content is inherently time shifted and a lot of uncertainty about show rating measurement would be removed. Real time programs such as sports or news could in theory work the same way, but would be biased for earlier delivery since such content loses value quickly. This system is close to a true individual content distribution method, but sacrifices instant viewing in order to exploit redundancies, reducing overall bandwidth requirements.

Anecdotal News Stories Are a Waste of Time

You know how news stories often lay out the experiences of a single individual, family, or small company in an attempt to put a human face on larger events? Yeah, well, I hate that. It's dull, and adds no useful information. In fact it does the opposite by ignoring meaningful statistics in favor of anecdotal evidence. Oh, and did I mention it's dull? So dull. To paraphrase Stalin, a single hardship is anecdotal, a million hardships is a statistic. Sorry, couldn't resist.