Virtual Newscast Can Solve All NBC’s Problems
NBC, as you may recall, is in dutch with parent company GE. They have been tasked with saving the company $750 million over the next couple of years. Well, they have been talking about getting rid of their pricey dramas and replacing them with reality shows; they’ve been consolidating office space; they’ve even rolled back the “free light bulbs for full-time employees” program. But I’ve found the real solution, and I’m sharing it for free.
NewsAtSeven.com, a project hosted by Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, has developed a software system which automatically composes a newscast. First you give it a topic to search for, such as Borat. Okay, your work is now done.
Bots take the search topic and find relevant stories from various news feeds, such as the BBC or Reuters, then use keywords to cobble together a script. Another bot searches YouTube and Flikr and Google Images for stills and footage related to the story. Finally another bot scans blog entries to find opinions about the story.
See what’s going on here? Instead of a team of expensive copy editors and script writers, we have a couple of bots doing exactly what they would have done – look on the internet for relevant material, and then steal it.
At this point it gets really cool. The program uses machinima, the process of manipulating a 3D video game to produce a film. Halo, Half-Life, Second Life, The Sims, are all useful for this purpose. A virtual news set is built and the script is fed into a speech synthesizer; the same script is also used to manipulate the “anchor” character’s mouth. You preprogram a few camera moves and there’s your desk shots. The blog comments go into the mouths of a “man in the street” character. It looks, in fact, something like this.
And here’s where the real savings come in. Because writers, they cost nothing. They’re nobody. But Brian Williams or Stone Phillips, good god! Dump those two and you have half the $750 large right there!
Half-Life is a limited visual palette, I know. This is why I have a plan B. Instead of machinima, this software could be adapted to use Actroid, the comely young Robot currently making the rounds at trade shows. There cannot be any more fitting use for Actroid than as a news anchor.
What about field reporters? Well come on, when do they ever do more than prop themselves up in front of a day-old crime scene? More Actroids!
Yes, I know that the news division is the only part of NBC that turns a profit, but sometimes you have to amputate a healthy limb to save the body. And sometimes you have to replace the limb with a cool bionic limb that is better, stronger, faster, and doesn’t cost thousands of dollars a year in hairspray alone.