My Own Clip Show

I recently watched a well-made, entertaining retrospective called Saturday Night Live: The First Five Years. It was composed entirely of clips from the show and interviews with the actors, writers and producers. Because SNL has hosted so many fine music performances over the years, I rented all of the Saturday Night Live – 25 Years of Music series. I enjoyed it as well. [more]

In both cases, I had an irrational complaint: they weren’t showing me exactly what I wanted. The First Five Years showed clips of sketches, never the whole thing. The music DVDs showed clips of performances, but never the whole thing. I wanted to watch The Band’s 1976 appearance in its entirety, but would happily skip ABBA and Jennifer Warnes all together (if you’re interested, all the hosts and guests are here). In short, I want a custom-made retrospective, showing me exactly what I want and none of what I don’t.

This is a common comment about customizing one’s media. It’s not so important for news media, I think, because I want to know what’s pressing and popular, but for documentary material, this approach is ideal.

TiVo has tempted us. It’s shown us the tip of the iceberg on bespoke content. I called my original complaint irrational, because we’re a long way from automatically generating a SNL show just for me. Still, you could make headway by collecting:

• My iTunes playlists and rankings, for musical selections
• My TiVo historical data, if I had a TiVo.
• My radio listening habits
• My Web searches
• My movie rental history
• My downloading habits

Put that all together. If it’s got the appropriate metadata (and the SNL sketches and performances as well), you might be able to hack together my musical and comedic tastes. You might discern, for example, that I like a dry humour, and don’t care for slapstick. So, there’d be more of Dennis Miller and less of Chevy Chase.

It’s all rank speculation at the moment. Maybe before this becomes possible, we’ll just be able to scan our brains. That seems smarter than depending on software infrastructure and interoperability.