Wednesday, April 19, 2006
TiVo and American Idol Predictions
So, I’ve spending a long time thinking about TiVo and its applications to the future of television. Last year, I waxed on about how TiVo could localize television advertising by providing hardware-based coupons to consumers in specific areas.
In the heat of the continuing American Idol juggernaut, I had another idea. I caught myself doing something interesting during the performance last night. I wanted to skip the commercials, so I watch the show an hour after it has aired. I noticed that I would skip the performances I didn’t like, and I would re-watch the ones I loved. Often, my distaste for a particular performance was so instant, I would start skipping within the first 10 seconds.
Looking at my TiVo privacy policy, I saw that they allow for the aggregation of anonymous content to help enhance the service. If that’s so, why couldn’t they track the skipping and rewatching habits of 5,000 users who watch American Idol post airing, and use the aggregate data around each contestant to predict their potential position in the voting lineup? Of course, for this to work, we’d have to work with the assumption that American Idol voting follows the general likeability of a performance, and that discounts for personal favoritism couldn’t be included. Or, could they?
What if we tracked each TiVo user’s behavior anonymously across multiple weeks, and created a weight-based system for their specific proclivity for a particular artist. For example, if user A rewinds every performance of Paris Bennett, but the majority of other users tend to skip her, we can under-weigh this user’s affinity to Paris in order to calculate the aggregate. I think.
The applications for this, by the way, are enormous. Because even though it is fun to predict who is going to get kicked off, the more powerful information is that of who continues to get the most viewership, and therefore (using our assumption,) the most number of votes. This means that the executives at TiVo could know well beforhand who is potentially going to win the entire prize...which, for marketers, could mean contacting their managers and getting endorsement rights well before the finale, for example.
Or, betting in Vegas. Do they have a line on Idol?