Why Don't We Have This Already?—Streaming
In a new thread about technologies and services that should already exist, I ask why—with all the data streamers have about us—it's so hard to find something to watch together? (Issue #187)
Before we get to today’s main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…
“How Usha Vance Knows Why Erika Kirk Grabbed Her Husband So Intimately” by Zuri Stevens in her Substack newsletter, “We Need a Black Woman in Charge“ is fascinating and disturbing; alas, she put it behind a paywall after (H/T) John Oliver linked to it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about with Vance and Kirk, here you go.
AI and dating article roundup.
I can’t tell if this is because it really is that hard to meet somebody these days or because the online dating services are struggling, both, or neither:
“Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself.” (NYT $) This explores new offerings where humans create synthetic duplicates of themselves that then go out to date other synthetics looking for a match that the human originals can enjoy. This seems unlikely ever to work since so much about attraction can’t be reduced to a profile. La Profesora and I didn’t even like each other the first time we met...
Facebook Dating now has 21 Million users, and it’s free, unlike many dating platforms, and it has an AI matchmaker. One alarming thing the article misses is that Facebook will undoubtedly use the data from Dating across its other services. Uh-oh. (NYT $)
“Will AI make dating apps better—or even worse?” from The Economist ($) is a nice rundown of the many different ways dating platforms are experimenting with AI.
“They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots—and Found Something Real“ (NYT $) is an unsettling piece about humans who feel they are in genuine relationships with Chatbots, a la Her.
I admire Jon Stewart, and it’s always nice when he gets interviewed rather than does the interviewing. David Remnick interviewing him at The New Yorker Festival recently is terrific: characteristically hilarious and also trenchant. Here’s the podcast.
From Pew: “Many Americans say they often come across inaccurate news—and have a hard time knowing what’s true.” It’s interesting data and an important read. For folks who want a resource to help them determine what’s reliable and unbiased, please use The Media Bias Chart from Ad Fontes Media. Disclosure: I’m an investor, advisor, and big fan.
Rory Sutherland is one of the most interesting minds in advertising and elsewhere. In this piece, he analyzes the sweet spot when buying wine: below a certain price you’re not getting anything, and above a certain price you’re paying for marketing. It’s a shrewd piece with lessons about the difference between price and value in realms far beyond wine. In Our Glass, a wine website with a punny name.
On the lighter side...
What happened when a woman bought all the inventory from a shut-down clothing store? All 4,500 items? ($ NYT).
I enjoyed this WSJ ($) profile of Dutch Bros., a drive-thru coffee chain that started in Oregon and is giving Starbucks a run for its money.
“Watson” Season 2 on CBS and Paramount+ started a few weeks ago, but I just saw the premiere. Wow! No spoilers, but I’m not yet sure I dig the final moments. Time will tell.
A sweet look back at TV’s first gay couple, Darryl and Marty, from Barney Miller in 1975. (NYT $).
Miscellaneous writing advice from an editor:
Never use the word “utilize.” Always use the word “use.” The two extra syllables buy you nothing other than puffery. (I wrote about Orwell’s similar writing rules here.)
I’ve changed my mind about split infinitives. They’re fine. It’s a stupid rule that pedants who don’t write make a fuss about. Clarity always wins, and it’s easier to be clear with split infinitives, to boldly go where most writers have already gone.
I’m also putting an end to the hoary objection to ending sentences with prepositions, which is silly and leads with ideas up with which I shall not put. I suspect that one started when somebody with too much high school Latin focused too hard on “pre” + “position” and decided that there couldn’t be a pre-position at the end.
Prefer “typical” instead of “normal” because there’s no value judgment in typical. In normal, there is. If you want to make a value judgment, that’s your affair, but do so knowingly.
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As regular Dispatch readers already know, I have several running themes or threads. This issue, I’m starting a new one: Why Don’t We Have This Already? I’ll dig into technologies and services that we should already have, but that don’t exist because of a lack of imagination or lack of obvious incentive.
Here goes...
Why Don’t We Have This Already?—Streaming
I have long worried that Amazon thinks I’m crazy. More precisely, I worry that Amazon thinks I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder—a.k.a. the many faces of Brad—because La Profesora and the kids and I share an Amazon account that is in my name.
“Who is this nutter?” I fret that Amazon thinks, “who is interested in science fiction, Shakespeare” (OK, both of those are me) “makeup, supplements, cooking implements, books about rowing, gadgets for rowing, sexy Halloween costumes, a squeaky toy hammer, oatmeal, a bizarre variety of stress balls, and more??” This is most apparent on Amazon’s main page where all the recommendations for different products across all the different interests of my family members makes it look like I’m experiencing a psychotic episode.
In 2015, Amazon started Amazon Household (now Amazon Family) where family members can have different profiles, but by then the imagined damage to my reputation for sanity on Amazon had long been done.
The different streaming services were earlier to profiles for multiple family members, but since I’m typically the one who sets up the service (and since my name starts with B), my profile is first. My family tends to use my profile because they just want to get to the watching already, and because there’s no compelling incentive to building individual profiles.
But what if there was?
Despite having been married for decades, La Profesora and I struggle to find things to watch together because our tastes, except for our complementary tastes in spouses, are wildly different. Our individual watching tastes also change depending on the time of day and what sort of day. On a work night, after dinner and right before bed, La Profesora doesn’t want to watch anything with violence or bad things happening to people, which leaves police procedurals, mysteries, science fiction, and the nightly news right out. I find all but the last in that list relaxing. On the other hand, La Profesora thinks that The Studio on AppleTV is a scream, whereas it leaves me squirming on the couch or in the fetal position on the floor next to the couch.
It’s a good thing that “watching TV together” wasn’t in our marriage vows because we never would have made it.
With all the data that Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, and the rest have about us, you’d think it would be trivial for them to say, “Hey, Brad and Kathi, we think you’d really like watching [insert magically, mutually appealing program title here] together.”
Outside of occasional genre descriptions like “Watch Together for Older Kids” (Netflix), none of these services recognize the possibility that two people might be watching TV together, let alone make it easy for them to find something. Add another person or two (e.g. if the kids are watching with us) and the likelihood of finding something that everybody will like drops further.
What I want is a Tinder-like service where La Profesora and I will each swipe right to indicate “yeah, I’d watch that” or swipe left for “naw.” The service would take into account the totality of our watching histories, what we each completed, what we abandoned, how important newness is to each of us, as well as what we typically watch at different times of day. The service, let’s call it 2Gether (I’m sure that there’s something out there with this name already, but go with me, please; it’s a hypothetical), would also know all of our streaming services (the JustWatch and Reelgood apps do this bit) as well as our appetite for saying “screw it” and paying for a rental.
As I was thinking this over, it occurred to me that surely somebody had already given it a try. ChatGPT led me to a smartphone app called “Matched“ that does some of it. However, it looks like Matched hasn’t been updated in quite some time, and the “2021” copyright at the bottom of its web page is a discouraging sign.
Even if Matched were doing great as a business, the logical platforms to offer a 2Gether service are Roku, Amazon, YouTube, or one of the conversational AI chatbots. ChatGPT does a pretty good of having a conversation with more than one person if you make it clear to the bot that there are two folks on the line, and it would be neat to have a conversational overlay on the Tinder-like matching.
Implications of Why 2Gether Doesn’t Exist Already
Elsewhere, I’ve explored the downside of overfocusing, which is when people and organizations ignore the context of experiences by paying too much attention to an end product. For example, in the early days of Uber and Lyft, car manufacturers ignored the threat these Get a Ride Services posed to car ownership: they were so focused on selling their cars that they didn’t think they needed to make the case for car ownership itself.
Most of digital technology and the commercial internet focuses on individual use cases and experiences. I’ve always thought that the “i” in “iPhone” (and iMacs, and iPads, and iPods back in the day) indicated this individual focus. It’s all about my experience as an individual rather than our experiences as couples, groups, collectives, and populations.
Digital advertising folks talk about hyperpersonalization as a goal of marketing on the idea that the more narrowly fitted an ad is an individual, the more likely that ad will lead to a sale. There are clear commercial reasons for hyperpersonalization, but there are social downsides.
Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if our ever-increasing polarization—and our decreasing ability to talk with the folks we disagree with—has accelerated in part because of hyperpersonlization.
If, with a nearly infinite supply of TV to watch, it’s difficult for two people who love each other to find something to watch together, then what does that say for our ability to thrive together as a population of millions?
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
* Image Prompt: “Please create a photorealistic image of a man and woman sitting dejectedly on a couch, a TV remote control sitting on the couch between them. They cannot agree on what to watch, and are just sitting there, silently, instead.”