Future development plans
This project is still at a very early stage. Some more
of the ideas that I have for it include:
Who is watching?
I have a wife and two kids at home, so the television
isn't only used by me.
But I still want to be able to see what I watch, without
it looking like I watch CBeebies for a bit every afternoon. :-)
As a first stab at addressing this, my back-end
capturing service records the visible bluetooth device
IDs for every event it captures. If my phone's bluetooth
ID can be seen, then there is a reasonable chance that I
am watching the television.
For the moment, I'm only including events which include
my phone's ID in the website visualisations.
Eventually, I'm thinking about exposing this as a
filter: see everything watched on our TV, see stuff
watched when I'm at home, or my wife is at home, or when
we're both at home, etc. I also want to try other ways
of filtering... perhaps using location services such as
Latitude?
Other media types
One of the fields for events captured is the media type.
At the moment, there are two possible values: live TV,
and watching time-shifted programmes recorded from TV. I
want to add support for other media types, such as DVDs
and web video such as Google Video and
YouTube watched through the television.
Analysing programme contents
At the moment, I'm looking at a fairly limited set of
properties of the television programmes that I watch -
such as the title, descriptions, broadcast times,
channel, and so on.
I'd like to be a little more creative...
What about the soundtrack - such as looking at trends
about when I listen to loud programmes versus quiet
programmes?
What about the image - such as looking at predominant
colours... or how often there is a significant change?
Could I tell the difference between editing styles, and
look for patterns in this?
Recommendations
Something that uses titles, description, and cast lists
to offer recommendations. Ideally even including
integration with my HTPC setup to automatically schedule
recommended programs for recording
Measuring attention
How I could tell if anyone is paying attention to the
television?
It'd be interesting to tell the difference between when
the TV is just on in the background and being largely
ignored, and when we're attentively watching a
programme.
Love it
It'd be interesting to have a way to share when I love a
programme that I watched. Something that submits a
message to twitter, facebook, etc. ?
Update (10 Jan): made a start on this
Bug fixing
There are still a bunch of bugs to fix in the back-end
script that captures TV watching events...
It doesn't notice if we pause TV, so you end up
"watching" a half-hour programme for an hour if you
leave it paused for 30 mins. So for the moment, I'm
trying to remember to use 'STOP' when I go get a coffee
instead of 'PAUSE'.
Others
Any other ideas for things I could try?
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