Tag: million dollar ideas

media tech

All spoilers must die

Two ideas. 

The first is easy. Why is it not a thing on Facebook (or Twitter, I guess) to tell the site not to show you content about a TV show or movie if you haven’t already seen it? I watch Game of Thrones (though sometimes I think of it as more an abusive relationship than anything else). Last night, HBO aired the typically epic penultimate episode of the season. I did not watch it because reasons. That’s OK, though, because HBO Go. I’ll get to it tonight (probably). So why, when I land on Facebook this morning and am confronted by the first of about 63,000 GoT recaps and hot takes couldn’t I have flagged it as spoilery and ask Facebook to hide all similar content for 24 hours? Next morning, Facebook could ask me if I’d like to see GoT content again and I could either say no, still haven’t seen it, or sure. In which case, Facebook could offer me the top three posts on the subject. This seems ridiculously easy. It would make my Facebooking experience so much better. 

Take this one step further. The new Captain America movie is in production and there have been a similar 63,000 blog posts about leaked production shots, etc., that all give away some elements of the story that people like me would like to avoid. So why can’t I tell Facebook to hide Cap spoilers? They know which stories I’m talking about. For starters, any one that has the word “SPOILER” in the headline. Or other keywords like “rumored” or “spotted” or “don’t read this if you don’t want to know.” Sure, I tend not to read these things, but I also don’t want to have to see them cluttering up the joint. Plus, some sites are really bad at shielding spoilers and I end up seeing them through no fault of my own (WARNING: SPOILER). 

Take this two or three steps further, and what I’m talking about is intelligent muting. For instance, I don’t want to see any crazy-ass right-wing conspiracy stories about Obama some of my less politically enlightened friends might have liked or commented on but I am OK seeing stories about those stories from other sites making fun of them. Or maybe I’m over any further mention of Caitlyn Jenner’s intro on Vanity Fair. A simple “I’ve seen enough stories about this” item is what I’m talking about. More than the option of not seeing any more items from a specific site. What I want is not to see similar items from that site and others like it. Seems like Facebook could absolutely pull this off.

The other thing is Twitter specific. I like to watch live TV with Twitter streaming along side. Specifically, baseball but also things like the Oscars or whatever. Sometimes, I’m intentionally delayed because I’m DVRing but usually I’m off by about 5 or 6 seconds because I watch baseball via MLB.tv and it takes a few moments to digitize the video and compress it and send it to satellites in space and then pull it back down FROM SPACE and then stream and uncompress it and all that and then “live” is only kinda live. It’s enough that I sometimes stop looking at Twitter because I don’t want the action I’m looking at to be spoiled.

So how come I can’t DVR Twitter? Tell my client app to offset the tweets by a specified amount of time. Of course, anything I tweet will be going out in real time (asking Twitter to tunnel through spacetime and drop my tweet back when whatever I’m commenting on took place is, I admit, a steep ask), but what I see will be better synced to what’s happening in front of me.

Turns out, I’m not the first guy to think of this:

That’s from more than three years ago. And still nobody’s done this!? How hard can it be?

Anyway, those are my ideas helping us to live in a spoiler-free world. 

media tech

A modest proposal

It’s once again pledge time here on the northern plains. Our local public radio outfit is doing their quarterly hat-passing which, of course, as a sustaining member (meaning, they get an automatic donation from me every month without fail) I totally acknowledge as a critical imperative.

I’ve been listening to pledge drives for more than half my life now. The worst were when I lived in Brookline and someone at WBUR thought placing a phone with an actual ringing bell in close proximity to the microphone so you could hear your fellow listeners calling in…at 5:45 in the morning…was a great idea. Nicely done. From the “more annoying the better” school of thought, no doubt. I even volunteered a few times to man the phones for my local station (back before you couldn pledge any other way). A lot has changed, but a few things haven’t.

Pledge drives go on too long and totally suck.

As I recall, they used to say on my local station (though they don’t anymore for some reason), “If everyone who was going to pledge all pledged right now, the drive would be over and we’d go back to our regular programming.” But that doesn’t happen. EVER. Nine times out of ten, the drive goes right up to when it was planned too because those public radio bean counters are really good at that kind of thing. They do it for days. On an on.

And I kept thinking, what if we had the technology to stop hearing the pledge drive as soon as they got my pledge? Or for sustainers such as myself to never hear the drive in the first place? Because it’s radio, the first mass electronic media, and what I described isn’t possible. But a lot of the time, I don’t listen to public radio on the radio. I listen on my phone. I stream it.

So here’s my idea. Add account authentication to the app (i.e., let me sign-in). Once recognized and identified as a sustaining member, let me listen to a different stream. One without pledging. Not special content because presumably whenever someone local is talking, there’s an NPR story they’re not playing instead. So play me that. Then switch back to the local stuff after the pledge break.

This is totally possible. I’m not talking science fiction here.

Personally, I’d only make this feature available for sustainers because those are the members public radio wants the most. Nice, uninterrupted cash-flow. But, they could also make it possible for those who pledge through that app. Instant upgrade. The only real issue to this in-app pledge idea is that Apple would want their regular 30% cut. In that case, make the iOS users do it on the website. Problem fixed.

This would totally change the pledge drive dynamic. Right now, a huge wall of people wait until the very end because they know there’s no reason not to. They get no benefit pledging on day one because they have to listen to the whole pledge drive anyway. In fact, their procrastination might actually be rewarded if they never get around to it and the drive ends. But with the alternate pledge-free stream option, the faster you act, the faster you can avoid the horrible pledging monotony. There’s a real, tangible and immediate benefit to pledging. They really could end a pledge drive in a day.

This does, of course, penalize those without smartphones or computers (the alternate stream could also be fed though the station’s website). But those people are fewer and farther between than they used to be and would totally benefit from the shorter drive like everyone else.

In any event, it seems to me this must be something someone at some radio station somewhere is working on. If not, why not? Why are pledge drives still run like it’s 1974?