Tracking Media Consumption

So I work for the BBC. This is not a BBC presentation. I am actually the senior Firestarter in BBC R&D and this is a project that is kind of in progress so it’s not complete, but we’re looking at media consumption. When I mean media consumption I mean what you see and what you consume.

Why are we interested? There is a really good interview I did last year with this lady and I highly recommend that you check it out. But we’re interested in the state and the context of people. So when you’re watching or when you’re consuming media what state are you in, how does that effect your choice in media.

So we have a project on the side which is about understanding the media consumption and the mood and stuff like that. And part of it is what we do we get people to fill in media diaries, and then we interview them and ask them little questions.

But we thought if we could give them a load of sensors that we could learn a lot more about their life and what that all means and why chose certain parts of the media. So we looked at some sensors kind of wondering which one would suit, and also give sensors to everyday people.

So we chose the Fitbit Flex because it seemed quite straightforward, and it seemed kind of not too bulky and you can wear it and away you go. The data is reasonably quite good.

We also chose the Scosche Rhythm to do the heartrate. We thought we would have an understanding of people’s heartrate and how that effects their media consumption. We also chose the Autographer which I’m wearing right now, because we wanted to understand what they were looking at, because a lot of the times that they were looking at something else or something was on but there were actually looking at something else; maybe talking to someone.

We also chose some apps we didn’t really choose the Move app; it’s got to work on android and IOS, and there was no way we could go one or the other. We also started looking at Scrobbling activity. So Scobbling you probably know about Last FM will automatically tell a service what you’re watching over this thing called trakt, and most of you guys know Last FM. And they are really good and they sort of created stuff and the API and the data is quite easy to get the data from.

So this is Trakt. TV, so you can see this is the last month. I’m a big fan of Crisis and typically a big fan of First Dates which is very interesting and a load of other shows. Obviously Fitbit creates all these nice graphs and stuff like that which is fantastic. But getting the data out is a little bit more tricky as you are going to find out.

Also with Autographer, it’s quite dark but these are some of the pictures that I’ve created, pictures of me on my phone. So we tried it and the Scosche Rhythm was a nightmare to set up, and in the end we just left it; it’s on the side and we just don’t bother with it. There are other people doing this as well, but I decided not to use it.

Getting data out of Fitbit, I tried doing this which is on the site. It was a bit of a nightmare, someone did get it out, but I have got a lot of data and also in the end I ended up creating a media diary and using Google Docs to do that; I’m not much of a paper person, so I use Google Docs so you will see my media diary.

Google do this really nice thing with a dashboard, and I use the dashboard quite a lot because it is automatically tracking what I’m doing across Google’s kind of universe, and I’ve used that quite a bit in my media diary.

This is my media diary and this is what I wrote down, and it’s basically what I was watching, where I was at home or whatever it’s all there, and I tried to put them into Fluxstream. I ended up with very weird results, and it might of been as I heard from Fluxstream it’s actually more of the data which is from the services which is a bit weird. So we are thinking actually maybe we should concentrate more on the live stream rather than the Quantified Self side of things especially after the results that we got.

So I looked at my diary and I started to pull out where I was getting this stuff from, and a lot of it is from Trakt and Last FM, but there is quite a lot from the Google dashboard pulling stuff that I had missed.

This is the most popular photo on my stream over a weekend, and it’s me on the sofa and the TV is there, but it’s kind of like that which is a bit rubbish.

Also we were thinking maybe we should start tracking the moods and sound tracking and start looking at If This Then That to do this stuff for the average person.

So we started using Fluxstream again and we got slightly better results, but for example I’m using Linux and this doesn’t actually create the geotags which is really annoying, so I have to manually put it in.

So some insights; there is a lot of binge watching, so you will see that over the last year I watched a lot of Dragon’s Den and there wasn’t that much Dragon’s Den or personal interest. What happens is that I do what most people do and that’s download a load of stuff and then watch it one after the other, and the results do proof that it’s just that you can’t see it right now. So that’s me, and if you want anything else, and see me or this is my email address.

Thank you.