Bear with me for a second, I promise this isn't a video game spiel...
Recently, Conan O’Brien announced that he will be returning to TV with his new show on TBS. Before he settled with TBS, he was in negotiations with several different offers, the most surprising negotiation being with Microsoft.
Microsoft was in talks with Conan to bring his show to the software giant’s Xbox 360 subscription based online service, “Xbox Live.” If the deal went through, Conan’s new show would have been streamable from any xbox live subscriber’s xbox 360 video game console and could be watched at anytime if they happened to miss the live broadcast.
ESPN recently announced that ESPN 3 would be coming to Xbox Live in an instantly streamable format, showing that Microsoft is heavily looking at bringing more than videogames to its live subscribers.
This type of media broadcast is nothing new. The internet allows users to stream content live or watch pre-aired programs from their computers and this type of video streaming may be the future of television programming.
One thing this type of broadcasting does much better than television, is it opens up a much more accurate rating system. The current rating system for television is not nearly as accurate as you might think. For one, college students are not taken into account in this system, as no rating boxes are offered for kids living away from home. Another thing that leaves this sytem inaccurate is that the at home rating boxes don’t account for when the television is on, but nobody is paying attention and telephone surveys leave the information to trust that the person being interviewed is being honest about what they watch.
Accurate ratings are important to broadcasters. The more people watching a program, the higher they charge for advertising spots. Low ratings can mean a show gets cancelled. In Conan O’Brien’s case, he had low ratings, but a large part of his audience was believed to be in the ignored demographic of college age kids, mainly males.
Xbox live and most other online game services already constantly monitor the user’s interaction with the service. For gaming, it is used as a way to gather information and discover glitches for the games people are playing. Say, a game developer looks at last month’s game statistics they compiled through xbox live and notice that in, say, halo 3, the use a certain weapon shot up 300% from the last month.
This monitoring systemlets the developers know there is either a glitch being exploited, or possibly the weapon is overpowered and needs to be fixed. This type of “rating” system lets developers monitor the gameplay and make adjustments where they see fit. Gone are the days where if a game ships with a few glitches, it is overlooked. Now, games can constantly be tweaked and updated, correcting overlooked problems during the game’s development.
Using this type of program monitoring on broadcasted programming seems like it could correct the problem of unreliable ratings, but it has one huge draw back: privacy concerns.
Gamers don’t mind constantly being monitored to offer the chance of helping developers find the bugs, but programming viewers may. Knowing that what programming a person is watching is traceable by the developers seems a little bit like “Big Brother” is watching. Maybe the viewer is watching something he doesn’t want others to know they are watching. Maybe sometimes unreliable is the best that can be done.
Except in the case of World Cub Soccer officiating and for blown “perfect game” baseball calls.
