As NCTA President & CEO Michael Powell noted in his opening remarks to #INTX2016, every screen is now a television.
That’s a double-edged sword. As more opportunities exist to consume video everywhere, the concept of traditional broadcasting is in upheaval. Entertainment programming has started to respond to this disruption rather successfully with shows like “Fargo” or “True Detective,” which take a cinematic approach to television.
“[Entertainment] television is becoming more like the movie business,” Andy Lippman, Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, said today at the opening talk in Imagine Park.
While we’ve seen entertainment programming start to thrive in the new media landscape, can the same be said for news? And for something as important as news coverage, that’s a big problem. With high-quality on-demand programming competing for eyeballs, how do we make sure news coverage doesn’t slip through the cracks?
Lippman and MIT would like to remind us that they don’t know exactly what the future looks like, but after getting a peek at some of what they’ve put together, you might get a good idea.
Inspired by John Stewart’s success with recapping the day’s news, the MIT Media Lab team tries to take a similar approach. They pull in 19 different broadcast news feeds and, using new technology, automatically assign topics to each segment. The result is a system that shows trends across broadcast outlets in near real-time, similar to topics on Twitter. Click a term, and you’ll see the relevant news clips.
If the recent history of entertainment television is any indication, this new approach will hopefully result in higher quality coverage and innovations we haven’t begun to consider.
“Can we reinvent broadcasting to bring back the social component that social networks have stumbled into and grown tremendously with,” Lippman remarked. “And what you’re doing is exactly the kind of step in the middle where you break down the boundaries and merge the perspectives and let people wander freely through them.”
Tech Talk with Tony: Andy Lipman from The Internet & Television Expo on Vimeo.