Tangents

Every so often I take a look to see what is currently topping the weekly charts for illegal downloads on Torrentfreak.com and I always have a question. What does it mean to be the most downloaded film?

Take this week’s chart topper: Real Steel certainly didn’t strike me as much of a proposition when it was in the cinema, but I wonder is it a film people are willing to watch though unwilling to pay for and thus more likely to top the charts for illegal downloads than others. These charts clearly don’t reflect the real worth of product but is the dynamic that distinguishes this consumption measurable?

So is it possible to take a film’s performance in paid legal consumption, compare against illegal unpaid consumption, measure the difference controlling for audience profile’s technical abilities etc etc, and discover a quantum that describes how willing people are to watch something, but are unwilling to pay: the Too Shit To Pay/Just Good Enough to Watch co-efficient (or TSTP/JGETW co-efficient… yes I would consider renaming it!)

Can some number cruncher start working on this? I lack skill, will, time…

Well that was what appeared on RTE this week during the coverage of Irish league soccer. The third time they gave us the guests names they couldn’t come up with a factoid for Colm Foley beyond his fascination with space travel? Lordy…

The BBC Radio Labs team have been up to some very interesting stuff, as often they are. This time they’ve taken a novel approach to The Archers, a long running daily radio drama broadcast on Radio 4. Now while I’m not a fan of The Archers, in fact I never listen to it, I’m familiar enough with the format. It’s short and there are a number of scenes seperated by silence. What the Radio Labs folks have done is parse the structure of each episode into scenes with attached information on characters, location, weather, which storyline, and other tags. It means locating a scene is easy, reconfiguring them as segments is easy, concentrating only on one story line is simple etc. The effort is to create metadata for the development of a new dynamic page for the show. So you could click into a page about a character or storyline or relationship, and be presented with the scenes and info on other related facets. Very clever.

What I found really curious is the graphics. Read the rest of this entry »