It has become clear in my observations of others’ behaviors over the course of, and the eventual dissolution of a relationship that one may be able to draw a graph showing relative value of items exchanged between the parties involved in couplehood, similar, perhaps, to the way currencies are described between differing nations.
First, let us posit that two individuals are functioning as independent central banks, with their places of residence as separate economic zones or nations. In the early stages of a relationship, few items will have been exchanged; thus, in relation to each other, the currencies are in a state of parity, not unlike the USD and the CDN; one may consider that items can be exchanged on a one-for-one ratio.
As time progresses, however, the number of items transferred between the two nations grows. Eventually, the two peoples’ economies become rather entangled with one another. Ideally, the number of items exchanged between the two will have maintained some sort of parity–certain albums are at the other persons’ place, but with relatively equal value, should any shocks occur, no major amount of value is lost.
At this stage in the entanglement, often times the notion of a form of merger is floated: a common economic zone with a shared currency, not unlike the Euro or the proposed Asian Currency Unit. Regardless of whether the two entities combine under a single crown or instead form a commonwealth, this can pose a problem for the items used in trading–duplicates and redundancies will naturally arise. In such a case, these duplicates become devalued and withdrawn from the system as a whole, and ownership ceases to be individual, but rather communal.
Problems, however, will naturally arise when, inevitably, political winds change and the parties wish to dissolve the partnership. When this occurs before a common currency has arisen, the fast and furious desire to see all items of value return to the original economic zone can cause capital flight; the side slower to react often finds itself having their items drastically devalued compared to the other party’s, a dangerous situation should the other party choose to cease recognizing any value in any remaining items in the foreign zone. At this point, there is precious little incentive for the party acting more quickly to negotiate an egalitarian settlement with the laggard.
If this has occured after a common central bank was formed, the situation can be even thornier–the civil disorder that arises from any attempt at splitting a unitary organization causes numerous headaches, with territorial disputes and competing interests for valuation.
It is therefore suggested by this->one that under no circumstances should a unified central bank between two separate entities ever be considered, unless there is a greater threat (for instance, a fearsome opponent on the Eastern Front that threatens to conquer and assimilate all with mammoth tanks and tesla troops); if a unified central bank does form, a protective policy would be best, with very tight currency controls limiting the amount in a foreign zone and/or a rapid response plan to withdraw all outstanding items within a short period of time.
The profitability of television programming is still determined by a statistical system that measures a small sample population and builds out estimated shares each show has amongst the masses. Regardless of how you feel about the accuracy and precision (or lack thereof) of the numbers, this metric obviously cannot account for all of the other screens TV shows are now running on–particularly, computers.
While it’s relatively easy to figure out how well a show is doing on a legitimate source, like iTunes or XBox, because they keep track of sales figures, as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any serious thought gone into tracking alternative sources of programming–in this case, I refer to Bittorrenttrackers. (For those of you unfamiliar with Bittorrent, it’s a peer-to-peer distribution method that is very useful when sharing large files (>50MB), as it shares the distribution load between all connected nodes.)
I haven’t yet started building out data tables, or analyzing them, but it’s evident that one can quickly verify just how popular a show is by checking to see how many seeds and leechers there are for a certain program in the days following its initial broadcast. Often times, these will correlate with how popular a particular show is on television; for instance, checking in with btjunkie.org on Tuesday, 18. September, at 5:40 pm, CDT, one can see that the third season premiere of Prison Break has around 33,900 seeds, and 54,000 leechers; WeedsSeason 3, Episode 6 has approximately 8,000 seeds and 4,200 leechers; and Californication has 7,500 seeds and 6,000 leechers. All of these were broadcast the previous evening.
This information could theoretically be even more enlightening, particularly when considering that there are numerous shows not on the American networks that do spectacularly well thanks to this new method of distribution: Doctor Who, Series 3 (or Series 29, depending on how you count them), wrapped up in the Isles a few months ago, and regularly had many thousands of seeds and leechers after every broadcast–but it won’t be broadcast in the States for several more months. Battlestar Galactica’s (relatively) spectacular American ratings would have been less surprising to pundits and media buyers if they’d seen the Bittorrent seed/leech numbers in the days following their initial British broadcasts (the first season aired in Britain months before they flew here).
Additionally, it’s another data stream that can be used to gauge how successful a show is–particularly critical darlings or cult favorites that don’t seem to be doing well in standard television ratings, but might be doing quite well online–I refer in this case, of course, to Arrested Development. If alternate streams weren’t used, many other shows, such as the American version of The Office, would have also vanished–strong iTunes sales helped convince NBC to roll out the second season, during which the show truly came into its own.
I will admit that the type of people who use torrents are a small fraction of the actual watching population; they will tend to be much more technically savvy than your average viewer, but by that same token, these are people less likely to be watching television period; the convenience of bittorrent and watching the show sans advertising trumps having to watch at preset times, or even setting up a DVR.
Instead of fighting this, however, I’d like to suggest that perhaps the studios and networks harness and legitimize this in a way that they haven’t yet–release their shows onto the torrent sites themselves, in multiple formats, and WITHOUT DRM: most use Xvid as their encoding method, resulting in half-hour shows averaging around 175MB/233MB, and hour-long shows around 350MB. Track these numbers, and see how popular some shows are; finally, to actually make this somewhat profitable, instead of interspersing advertising within the television programs in ‘act breaks’, use pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and perhaps even a small watermark in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. (Left-hand side, if the language is written in the opposite direction…)
To further underscore that I’m not completely crazy, I’d like to point you to two Mindjack articles, referring specifically to the case of Battlestar Galactica: “Hyperdistribution” and “The New Laws of Television“; and one from TorrentFreak, which suggests that record labels are now learning things from p2p that they wouldn’t know otherwise.
Everyone loves and worships the Dear Leader. Well, they used to, anyway. In recent times, thanks to some very unpopular decisions, he’s lost a lot of support amongst the rank and file, and only solidified the poor opinion he’s had amongst his critics.
Still, I decided to put up a troll I wrote once, many moons ago, both as a test of the subdomain system my hosting provider has, and because I still like it.
So, while browsing the Flumesday article (I don’t know how I got to it~), I found myself highly amused by two ads of delightfully horrible nature. The first is a Jell-O ad from back before they invented color, and mocks the fact that–at least to the extent of the knowledge of the Madison Avenue writers of the time–we Mongoloids were unable to come up with such a simple invention as the spoon. (For one thing, we only had a pentatonic scale…)
I must admit this to be somewhat true. Until I learned of it, I had a deuce of a time trying to eat my soup with chopsticks.
Some days have passed with no updates. It took me a bit, but I decided to base the new reader off of lastRSS instead of Magpie RSS; while the modularity and much more comprehensive nature of Magpie’s tag matching is nice, I didn’t need something so complex–rather, I simply wanted a quick, simple reader.
I was also taken by the method by which lastRSS creates the data–it parses the feed and then places it into an associative array, which I hadn’t originally considered doing. The original reader that I’d written used an inelegant method that simply matched tags, and then dropped them directly into the page.
With the array method, however, it’ll be a bit easier for me to create a formatting script that places everything appropriately into the template, which I’ll be working on now. In the meantime, here’s the file for the reader: aeRSS 0.2.20070916
