TV and Telephone Voting

Television shows that take place over the course of an evening which are decided by telephone voting are frequently blighted by what I call the "I've just come in from the pub mob" and the "I've watched something else and then just flipped over for the end posse".

The problem
What happens is these groups of people both only see the end of the show and then, understandably, vote for one of the later candidates/acts/talents (CATs), because that's one of the ones they've seen. This gives the final CAT a significant advantage over everyone else and, indeed, depending on the country's pub culture and the other programmes on that evening with significant viewing shares, each CAT an advantage over all the ones who were on before them.

Solutions so far
There are measures designed to counteract this. One is having each CAT having to do something more than once. If, in a singing show with three CATs, each CAT has to sing twice, then you at least have CAT1 singing once after each of CAT3 and CAT2 has sung their first song (assuming a 1,2,3,1,2,3 order) - or you could have a different order like 1,2,3,3,2,1 to try to maximise fairness. Whatever you do though, you have one CAT who's on last and who catches the votes of the aforementioned mob and posse.

Another idea is to open the voting lines straight away, before any CATs have even been on stage. This is flawed insofar as it means that people who vote based on a performance have more time to vote for certain CATs whilst people who just vote based on prior sympathies can vote regardless of what the CATs actually do on the night.

So if we want a fair vote reflective of people's assessments of what the CATs have done during the show, this doesn't work. You could argue that being able to vote for CAT1 balances out the swing to CAT3 from the mob and posse, but having two terrible features in a system and hoping they approximately balance one another out is a bit like throwing a few nukes around and hoping more baddies than goodies die: neither scientific nor likely to work.

What you could do
My suggestion is to get people to register to vote. This would take place in the waffle that happens at the start of the show before any CATs have been on. This segment usually takes at least 15 minutes (on a standard Saturday evening format) and is ample time for people who are generally interesting in digging in for the evening to send a short text message (SMS) or ring up a number.

By registering they would make themselves (or anyone with the same phone number) eligible to vote during the voting phase, which would only begin after the last CAT's last performance. This seems technically straightforward to implement and would restrict voting to those people who have seen the whole show and so can make a fair decision. Clearly, some people might have some chips or something and miss one of the CATs, but you can imagine people's chip-eating habits to be varied enough for this to even itself out and not significantly (dis)advantage one CAT over another.

I don't really see many problems with this. You could, for example, easily adjust the price of calls to stop having to ring in twice hitting the voters' bank balances too much. It doesn't solve the fact that some certain audience sections (with some correlation with the kind of CAT they like) are more likely to take part in a phone vote than others, but that's true of all votes. At a parliamentary election, there are some sections of the electorate who would rather go down the pub than go cast their vote. And they automatically get underrepresented in the House of Commons.

The only real flaw I can see in this system is that it would probably lead to fewer votes coming in, which would mean less money being made. But if there has to be a victim for the sake of overall fairness, then you could find a worse one than television producers.

Post 100!!!

English translation follows the German text.

Dieser Post ist der 100. Post des Massiven Blogs!!!
Leider ist er auch einer der schlechtesten und zwar aus folgenden Gründen:
1) Den habe ich vor einer Woche komponiert, weshalb er jetzt seine Aktualität gänzlich verloren hat.
2) Den habe ich vor einer Woche eigentlich nur zur Hälfte geschrieben. Da das aber jetzt eine Woche her ist, kann ich den nicht mehr zu Ende schreiben, denn meine Gedanken sich längst fortentwickelt haben.

Zum Glück ist er in jeder anderen Hinsicht gar nicht so schlecht und äußerst empfehlenswert. Deswegen empfehle ich Ihnen hier weiter zu lesen und ich bedanke mich, dass Sie mich bis zum 100. Post begleitet haben.
Bis morgen. (bitte hier nicht aufhören zu lesen, der Post kommt jetzt.)

Ich habe versucht gerade, so buchstäblich drei Minuten lang, meine Gedanken zu sammeln, damit ich etwas zu der Zuschauerattraktivität einer Sportart schreiben kann. Dies ist mir leider nicht gelungen, denn ich finde bislang keine Logik. Es muss bestimmt eine geben, aber heute erkläre ich, statt der Logik, etwas von der Problematik, die es sehr schwierig macht, zu wissen, ob eine Sportart sehr oder überhaupt nicht Zuschauerattraktiv sein wird.
Im Folgenden werde ich die Sportarten nur aus der Sicht des TV-Zuschauers betrachten, um das Problem nicht noch unhandlicher zu machen.
Punkt 1: Ich dachte, Tennis würde etwas an seiner Langweiligkeit daher gewinnen, dass es nur zwei Persönlichkeiten pro Spiel anzubieten hat. Fußball hat 22 plus Auswechselspieler plus Schieds- und Linienrichter plus Trainer. Das sind viel mehr Leute, die der Zuschauer interessant finden kann oder die auch die Rolle des Bösewichts übernehmen können, was alles spannend machen kann.
Jedoch: bei Darts gibt es ebenfalls nur zwei Spieler und Darts ist durchaus in der Lage, Spannung von höchstem Niveau anzubieten
Auch: So genannte "Doubles"-Matches, an den vier Tennispieler statt zwei teilnehmen, sind noch unbeliebter (wenn man mit Zuschauereinschaltquoten Beliebtheit messen darf) als "Singles"-Matches (Spiele mit nur 2 Spielern). Daher scheint die Verbindung zwischen der reinen Zahl der Persönlichkeiten und der Popularität des Spiels den Tatsachen nicht standzuhalten.
Punkt 2: Punkt zwei fehlt aus den Gründen, die in der Einleitung erörtert wurden.


This post is the 100th post of the Massive Blog!!!
Unfortunately, it is also one of the worst. This can be attributed to the following factors:
1) I composed it a week ago, for which reason it has entirely lost its up-to-the-minute appeal.
2) A week ago I actually only wrote half of it. As, however, a week has now passed, I can't write it to its completion, because my thoughts have long since further developed.

Fortunately, it is not too bad at all in all other respects and certainly to be recommended. That is why I am recommeding you to continue reading here, and I I thank you for joining me up to my 100th post.
See you tomorrow. (please don't stop reading here, the post now follows.)

I just tried, for literally around three minutes, to gather my thoughts, so that I could write somthing about the attractiveness to viewers of a sport. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to do this, because I can so far not find any logic. There must certainly be one, but today I shall explain, instead of the logic, something about the problems that make it difficult to know whether a sport will be very or not in the slightest attractive for viewers.
In the following discussion, sports will only be observed from the perspective of a television viewer, so as not to make the problem any more awkward.
Point 1: I thought, tennis would get some of its boring nature from the fact that it can only offer two personalities per match. Football has 22, plus substitute players, plus referees and their assistants plus managers. That makes many more people for the viewer to find interesting or to take up the role of the bad guy, which can make everything exciting.
However: darts also only has two players and darts is more than capable of providing excitement of the highest order.
Also: So-called "Doubles"-Matches, which four tennis players rather than two take part it, are even less popular (if it is allowable to measure popularity with viewing figures) than "Singles"-Matches (matches with just 2 players). For this reason, the connection between the pure number of personalities and the popularity of the game doesn't seem to stand up to the facts.
Point 2: Point 2 is missing for the reasons discussed in the introduction.