Comment by Hamuko
2 days ago
Is the cost of on-air talent so great that you want to replace recognisable faces of your network with a generic voiceover?
Personally, I consider TikTok very different to news networks. TikTok is also primarily vertical video. Are news networks going to do that too?
I don't quite follow this point. Master Chief is recognizable. So is Lara Croft. So is Darth Vader's voice. Networks could easily develop virtual personalities with distinctive, bankable, appealing characteristics.
They wouldn't have off-air scandals, require insurance, pensions, teams of wardrobe and makeup artists, security details; They wouldn't need to travel. And that is just the on-air talent. You can replace thousands of tv studios all over the world with a handful of workstations and compute power.
And why haven't they? Master Chief has been around since 2001, Lara Croft since 1996 and Darth Vader since 1977. The technology has been around for ages, and as far as I know, no networks have opted for virtual anchors.
Just from where you are pulling the data that on-air personalities are too expensive?
I don't have a good answer for why they haven't already. I have wondered about the possibility of doing this for 10 years or more.
"The data that on-air personalities are too expensive?" It doesn't seem to me , for the purposes of this conversation, that identification of a cost center required a quantitative analysis. The cost of human talent is non-zero, presumably large enough to merit scrutiny, and unpredictable; that is sufficient, to my way of thinking. So is the cost of the equipment and infrastructure to capture and transmit video image of that human talent, and the humans who maintain and operate that infrastructure.
We've seen several decades of human cost-reduction initiatives, across multiple industries and fields of endeavor, so I'm taking that as evidence that if there is a cost that can be reduced or removed, someone somewhere is looking at doing so. Everything from assembly-line automation, to switching to email over inter-office memos and mailrooms, to the abandonment of fixed-benefit pensions, to self-service kiosks in fast-food restaurants, demonstrates that costs will be cut where they can be cut.
I think there's a good chance people would watch an entirely generated character read the news, so long as they find the presentation reliable according to their world view.
Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer or Lester Holt might as well be cartoon characters to me. There's practically zero chance I'll ever meet them in person, especially more that we'd have any kind of real human connection. What one cares about is if they think the overall source is reliable and what kind of information (or disinformation) their orgs are pushing to the people. Having them be actual meatbags is a liability, they'll pop too much ambien one night and say some pretty terrible things on social media compared to only ever being a highly curated output of the organization. Unless they pull a Tay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom