Doctor Who and the progress of TV Technology.

The 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who shows that even as the world changes, good storytelling does not. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Doctor Who is 50 today. Amongst the celebrations of the stories and the characters, it occurs to me that the Doctor’s longevity has seen him experience many changes in TV technology. After all, The Doctor has been around for more that half of the lifespan of our ability to watch TV – TV was first broadcast in the UK in 1929, and the first Doctor Who episode was broadcast in 1963. It was actually broadcast on the day of the Kennedy assasination; TV and history go together.

From its first episode (An Unknown Child in 1963) Doctor Who was a technical pioneer. Its titles was a pioneering use of the camera pointing at its own monitor, and the theme a pioneer of electronic music. It was broadcast in 405 line black and white following the ITU System A standard, and was called High Definition! But it had technical shortcomings, which were addressed by the next standard PAL-I, introduced in 1967. The resolution increased to 576 usable lines, audio was carried in FM, and so allowed broadcast of its first colour episode (Spearhead from Space in 1970).

This technical change required the entire production workflow to change. Sets now had to look good in colour, make-up was different. The increase in detail meant that composition of shots had to be re-thought. And the increased bandwidth of the PAL signal needed a change in video tape technology. All of this was needed, as well as stories that continued to capture the audience’s imagination.

There is a recurring theme throughout Doctor Who’s journey through broadcasting history: technology changes and increases the visual vocabulary available, but always  subservient to the storytelling. The Doctor Who makers have had to re-learn time and again how to tell their story as their storytelling tools changed.

Viewers expected more detail in the production with the introduction of 576 lines of black and white (The Web of Fear in 1968), then with colour (Spearhead from Space in 1970), then with greater picture area with widescreen (Rose in 2005), and even more detail with HD (Planet of the Dead in 2009), and most recently 3D (The Day of the Doctor in 2013). And as the screen size has increased from an average of 24” in 1963 to 36” in 2013, there is more screen to fill with more detail.

Soundscapes have had to become more complex, first with the introduction of stereo (Remembrance of the Daleks in 1988), then with surround sound (Planet of the Dead in 2009).

Special effects have always been important to the programme, and these have developed from ropey carpentry, to ropey plastic, to ropey visual mixing, and now to sophisticated computer-generated effects that its big budget finally allows.

A second theme to emerge is how business models changed, and Doctor Who changed to exploit them. The introduction of Betamax ushered in the next revolution in TV, the ability to record episodes of the Fourth Doctor for later viewing – time-shifting the time lord. But the ability for viewers to fast-forward through the ads would prove to challenge the business model for commercial broadcasters around the world, a challenge that still hasn’t been satisfactorily answered.

The advent of Digital TV came whilst Doctor Who was in hiatus. When it returned rejuvinated and rebooted (Rose in 2005) it arrived into a fragmented broadcast environment. Viewers changed to consumers with a variety of consumption channels competing for attention. So Doctor Who started publishing webisodes (Pond Life in 2012) and iPlayer-only mini-episodes (The Night of the Doctor in 2013).  Viewers started watching on their black and white cathode ray televisions, now watch on-demand, streamed over the internet, on their flat screen LCD TVs, and communicate with the show over the web site and its social media presence.

I think the viewers have rewarded the unwavering focus on storytelling by making the programme more popular than ever, across borders and ages. For today’s 50^th anniversary episode, it was simultaneously broadcast in over 75 countries. In the UK, it was also shown in cinemas in 3D, despite being broadcast on a free-to-air channel. Quite a journey through time, space and technology.

Solving the problem of too much TV.

At last I can watch something that I want to watch, not that somebody else wants me to watch to sell me something. blog.mindrocketnow.com

A few months back, I wrote about the fundamental problems of TV that had yet to be solved. I wrote about the explosion of choice paradoxically leading to a short tail of content actually chosen. I wrote about how more interactivity led to poorer engagement with the devices. And I wrote about how increasingly sophisticated devices led to a complex and less reliable viewing environment.

However, one company recently has made a very interesting attempt at solving the problem of what to watch next. The BBC's announcement last month of the next version of its online services is quite a significant signpost.

Traditional radio is the most beloved content curation paradigm. DJs are taste arbiters. They decide what you’re going to listen to next, and the good ones will surprise you with songs that you didn’t know you liked yet. And because getting you to listen is worth money, the DJ becomes the gatekeeper to this revenue stream.

Where there’s money, there are people wanting to make more money, which is why we’ve gone from personal tastes that we can identify with, to corporate playlists that reflect corporate agreements. (And on the flip side, there is also an emergence of social responsibility in playlists; e.g. FGTH's Relax being banned from Radio 1, quite rightly in my opinion, so it’s not all bad).

Playlister is a new paradigm in content discovery. It combines curated playlists (by DJs that we can identify with) with personalisation (user has to select which tracks to acquire). Since the DJ represents the corporation, songs are still selected from playlists, but what you listen to is in collaboration with your chosen taste arbiter.

There is an inherent limit to how the BBC can tailor its broadcast content to its viewers. Even with 8 domestic and many more international channels, there is a limit to number of simultaneous channels (well, 8), and therefore simultaneous demographics that can be entertained.

Online delivery removes that limitation; each iPlayer user can select their own content. If we combine this with the Playlister approach, each iPlayer user can now have their own channel.

This has been tried before, with analytics providing a suggestion for your next programme using the “people like you also like” approach. But using a TV DJ, a TV taste arbiter, to curate content has an increased likelihood of the next programme actually being one you want to watch.

The money is there to be made. iPlayer 30 day catch-up fulfils the public service obligation, iPlayer download-to-own / link to BBC section of the iTunes store fulfils commercial obligation to make money.

This will only work because the BBC has a brand that is globally renown, and a legacy of content that is the envy of all broadcasters. This approach won't work for all content producers. They will have to club together to achieve the global reach and globally-relevant catalogue.

There are two problems with TV: 1. Finding what to watch, and 2. Engaging appropriately with the TV. BBC's iPlayer 3.0 + Playlister solves the first. But it still relies upon old PC engagement paradigms for working the iPlayer application, which is the great hindrance to it achieving greatness.

Surprising Probability (or why we learn more from our mistakes, than from our successes).

Simple statistics show that I learn more from my mistakes, yet I only get rewarded for success. blog.mindrocketnow.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem#Drug_testing

Suppose a test for Mind Rockets is 99% sensitive and 99% specific. That is, the test will produce 99% true positive results for Mind Rockets and 99% true negative results for non-Mind Rockets. Suppose that only 0.5% of people are actually Mind Rockets. If a randomly selected individual tests positive, what is the probability he or she is a Mind Rocket?

Despite the apparent accuracy of the test, if an individual tests positive, it is twice as likely that they are not actually positive, than they are. This surprising result arises because the number of non-Mind Rockets is very large compared to the number of Mind Rockets, so a small percentage of a large number is still larger than a large percentage of a small number.

To use concrete numbers: if 1000 individuals are tested, there are expected to be 995 non-Mind Rockets and 5 Mind Rockets. From the 995 non-Mind Rockets, 9.95 false positives are expected. From the 5 Mind Rockets, 4.95 true positives are expected. So in our sample of 1000, out of 14.9 expected positive results, only 4.95 (33.2%) are genuine.

If we flip this around, out of the 995 non-Mind Rockets, we expect to find 985.05 true negatives. And in the 5 Mind Rockets, we expect to find 0.05 false negatives. Therefore out of the sample of 1000, we can expect to find 985.1 negatives, of which 99.99% are genuine. So we learn more from the negative results than from the positive results.

Why is this important? As The Economist pointed out, academic research, particularly pharmaceutical research, disproportionately rewards positive results, despite negative results (and even replicating results) being more meaningful. Moreover, society in general rewards success and doesn’t acknowledge the positives in failure.

I can see that this is changing in the school where I am a Governor; we’re trying very hard to “scaffold” the learning so that the children learn through failure as well as success. But after that, further schooling and then work is still all about high marks in SATs and performance-based bonuses, and is at odds with personal growth.

We need our education system to be more entrepreneurial. I don’t mean that we need all of our students to be dot com millionaires or winners of the Dyson prize. We need our education system to give our children the confidence to treat both imposters of triumph and disaster the same. Because that’s the only way that they will be able to fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.