Sounds like a good thing...
...if it can control the ratio of content to padding in Horizon etc.
Rejoice! The BBC boffins can customise their broadcasts to suit your prejudices. The “Visual Perceptive Media” project invites us to “imagine a world where the narrative, background music, colour grading and general feel of a drama is shaped in real time to suit your personality” – and will even tweak the output to “fit your …
They forgot to add the old chestnut about how they fully understand the importance of user privacy issue and how they apply the most stringent technological means to ensure the data remains safe. Sigh...
FUCK!!!!!!!!!
OFF!!!!!!!!!!!
"In a post-Saville world does the BBC HAVE any moral authority?"
The BBC employs over 20,000 people, with tens of thousands more indirectly employed via production companies, as freelance professionals, etc.
You'll forgive me if I decline to lump all of them (along with my uni mate who does incredible things with the Natural History unit) in with the champagne-swilling management of the 1970s-80s who turned a blind eye to god knows what
What place does the BBC have in a world where we are all retreating into self-referential silos? The Internet does seem to be promoting a race to the bottom in terms of journalistic quality, with 'facts' being recirculated regardless of the veracity their underlying foundations. We will all live in our own little echo chambers, shut off from anything that challenges our narrow world view.
I'm not sure what the answer is, or even if one is required. Perhaps the brief period of pre-Internet TV will come to be seen as some golden yet naive age?
As I read it, this is an experiment which would tweak the presentation of the drama, whether you prefer it filmic or interlaced video, the background music a little lower, a happy ending or a sad one.
Taking it to a individual broadcast schedule or filtered news is not really on the horizon at the moment
Aye, but at least with changing the channel there's a chance you might see something you hadn't previously considered, and having it catch your interest. This way you'll never see anything you don't expect, unless they stick random material in.
To be honest, I think it's an appalling idea, but then, if you cut my head off it would say BBC down my neck.
"What a journalist's job is to try and do, is go a tiny bit further than that, and actually try and open people's minds up, and ask, ‘Have you thought of looking at it this way?’ …"
Except if the topic is global warming or anything else to do with green isues. Then you will only get what the BBC thinks is the consensus.
"Do you need" or "will you need"? It hasn't happened yet, so I presume you are asking "Will I need?". At the present time you only need a TV licence if you are watch or record live TV (not the ability to watch or record!).
By the time this comes out you may well find that the TV licence requirement is extended to accessing any of the BBC streaming services on iPlayer (which is most likely where this technology would appear). This was mentioned as part of the agreement to the BBC 'becoming responsible' for over 74 year olds TV licences.
Andrew,
I like your stuff and look forward to reading it, but I think on this occasion you've made a massive leap from very little evidence. I've learned a lot from Adam Curtis documentaries too, although that last one was a bit loooong. They will never get it to work anyway, and how the fuck is my mood going to relate to the background music anyway? It's a stupid idea, which sounded good in some brainstorming session.
I've worked at companies trying to develop personalisation algorithms and it's a pretty tricky problem. Personally I think I've got pretty eclectic taste, and therefore I've never found any useful results.
Having said that, Spotify Weekly playlist seemed to get it right for a while until my wife started listening to a load of 80s stuff, and it's ruined it. ;-) but that's another problem as one person's mood or interests would affect the experience for everyone who uses that telly.
I'm going to file this idea in the same box as Amazon's drone delivery. Probably not going to happen in my lifetime.
Since we are talking about the BBC, unless you are a hardcore neo-Nazi(or radical Leftist, to the extent there is a difference), you would almost certainly see a lot less antisemitism and oikophobia masquerading as news. The sniffles and hand-wringing over entrenchment in "self-referential groups" is a bit ironic coming from defenders of the cloistered pseudo-intellectuals at the BBC. It is, however, a stupid idea.
> Rather than taking the viewer beyond their prejudices or acquired experiences, it’s confining the viewer within the prejudices and experiences that they have already acquired
So very like choosing which newspaper to read?
Although I would fully expect that the prospect of tailoring programme content to individuals will be far too difficult and expensive. Rather, this technology will merely become a way of tailoring advertising to the punter.
An accusation often levelled at the BBC is that they they charge everyone but don't produce something for everyone. Here they are trying to produce something for everyone and that's not good enough either.
And the opposite of narrowcasting is nudging... the BBC can't do both narrowcast and nudge at the same time surely?
"...is go a tiny bit further than that, and actually try and open people's minds up, and ask, ‘Have you thought of looking at it this way?’ [...] What really happens now, is that they're so entrenched in their self-referential groups, anyone who joins up the dots any other way is a bad person."
Of course it does also help if the journalists have an open mind too, instead of being stuck in an entrenched viewpoint which won't let them acknowledge that other viewpoints may be correct and that someone who holds them is not necessarily a bad person.
...was ABBA, Deep Purple, Phantom of the Opera, Motorhead, Stravinski, and Rush to name just a few. I wonder how the BBC would catagorise my "habits" from that?
Answer. They can't. Because That's the stuff either uploaded to the car headunit built-in MP3 player or on a USB pendrive plugged into the car. I have more important stuff to store on the phone memory and since I'm on the road most of the time am simply never going to use it streaming so no one but me knows what I listen to.
Then again, as others have said, it seems more like kite flying than anything else. No doubt "lessons will be learned" and some of the results of their research will turn up elsewhere, possibly in totally unrelated fields or projects.
Part of me is appalled at the potential for privacy invasion and the profiling and analytics that will go along with it, including the inevitable carefully-tailored advertising designed to bypass my conscious decision-making processes. After all, I've made no bones about how much I hate being tracked and profiled.
But this also has promise. Being able to mess around with my content means I could strip out all the feminism, misandry and political correctness that has been seeping into popular entertainment of late. I can tune my shows so the male characters aren't all portrayed as perverts, morons or manginas, depict couples that aren't always either gay or interracial, get rid of the anti-racist, anti-sexist preaching, and the self-entitled bitchiness that seems to be de rigeur in so many of today's shows and movies.
Pandering to my prejudices? Oh yes, please. Anything to shut the agenda-pushing SJW brigade out of my life. They'll hate this. With a passion.
Hmmm... Why do I suddenly have the sneaking suspicion if this takes off it'll get canned all of a sudden, or certain options to change certain things will be removed so the PC army can still shove their agenda in everyone's faces? Given the media's propensity for PC and the increasing unpopularity of the PC movement, I can't see this passing unscathed the moment they wake up to the fact that the very people they're trying to preach to and reprogram, are suddenly able to exclude them.