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Frequently Asked Questions
What can I do with TV Kitchen?
Potential uses of TV Kitchen are limited, as the saying goes, only by your imagination–if your imagination runs toward doing interesting things with information you get out of video.
For starters, we’ve built a simple recipe that when you deploy it pulls and collects closed captioning from TV streams. This means most news shows. So you could potentially:
- Analyze common terms used by your local news programs, and compare them across networks to see how they differ;
- Create an alert system to let you know when your favorite topic is being discussed on TV;
- Pipe your favorite caption stream into some kind of real time annotation interface
As more appliances are created and contributed, and participants share metadata they collect, all kinds of uses will become possible – certainly ones we can’t think of by ourselves.
Why is community important for TV Kitchen?
TV Kitchen is built on the philosophy that the more people who get involved – developers, reporters, researchers – the more creative the recipes will become, and the richer the ingredients.
Rather than sinking all development costs and ownership in one organization that creates a bespoke architecture and is is then responsible for creating every iteration of every use, participants benefit from open source resources.
We hope that participants will also join in lively conversation via our chat and in other ways, because the more we communicate, the better the ideas.
Does TV even matter these days?
Yes! Local television news still attracts 25 million nightly viewers, and remains the most trusted source for news. Major media conglomerates, including Sinclair, Tegna, and Nexstar, have been snapping up these local stations, and now control nearly 40 percent. And despite the rise in social media advertising, local TV still attracted more than $1 billion in political advertising during the 2018 elections.
Is it just for TV?
No! We think TV is particularly interesting, but TV Kitchen recipes can be easily tweaked to work with other kinds of video as well. We already make it easy to ingest video files, but YouTube and Instagram political ads are another type of media we have our eyes on.