10th Place: Organizing Recorded Blu-ray Discs
At the end of last year, I posted a series on "How to Spend the Year-End," but after the new year, I will take on the challenge of posting a series based on the theme "10 Things I Want to Do This Year," starting from the bottom of the ranking. This is number 10: organizing my recorded Blu-ray discs.
These discs are the result of me recording dramas from various commercial broadcasters one after another since around 2014. They have increased so much that I can't keep up with organizing them; in fact, I've been gradually organizing them since last year, but I want to finish by the end of this year.
Why did they pile up so much?
Exactly 10 years ago, I was doing Wikipedia page view analysis for work. It seems that various studies on Wikipedia page view analysis are being conducted now, but...
Pageview Count refers to the number of times an article on Wikipedia is accessed per hour. (I just looked it up, and there are 1.4 million articles in the Japanese version of Wikipedia alone.) It was literally big data, and since it was a dataset too large to analyze on a PC, nobody was interested in such a futile task at the time. However, being the curious person I am, I continued the arduous task of downloading Pageview Count data from Wikipedia and analyzing it myself.
Initially, I created a daily ranking of popular articles, but I noticed that when popular dramas, such as NHK morning dramas, were aired, the corresponding Wikipedia pages would rank high. So, I thought, "Perhaps I can predict the final episode ratings of commercial dramas currently airing using Pageview Count?" and I became immersed in research to devise an analysis method. I thought, "I also need to check the content of the dramas I'm predicting later," which is how I started recording the dramas.
Predicting commercial drama ratings with Wikipedia
2013, when I started this research, was the year TBS's "Hanzawa Naoki" was aired. I'm sure many of you remember that this drama achieved the "highest record in the history of commercial serial dramas." When I examined the relationship between the ratings of each episode of "Hanzawa Naoki" and other "Toshiba Sunday Theater" dramas like "Downtown Rocket" and "Ando Lloyd" and the Pageview Count of their Wikipedia articles, I was able to confirm a correlation between the cumulative count for the 72 hours before and after the broadcast time and the ratings for that episode.
Furthermore, for commercial dramas that usually consist of a 10-episode series, I found that if I could obtain the cumulative page view values for the first 2-3 episodes, I could estimate the cumulative page view value and ratings for the final episode.
However, this analysis method has a weakness: the correlation can only be confirmed for "popular dramas that generate access to Wikipedia." For dramas in late-night slots where high ratings cannot be expected, no correlation between page view count and ratings could be confirmed. Unfortunately.
Does it not make much sense anymore?
Although I stopped the research itself over five years ago, I continued recording dramas out of habit, but last year I started thinking, "It's about time to stop." This is because I felt that the obsolescence of television broadcasting itself had become noticeable. In particular, the influence of distribution service providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Abema TV has become stronger in modern entertainment video production, including dramas. They have the means to accurately grasp user viewing behavior without relying on external businesses. Plus, there's YouTube. I think the people who care about ratings have changed significantly. Along with that, I suspect that companies like Video Research, which once had an overwhelming position in surveying ratings, may no longer be as strong as they used to be... There is no doubt that the paradigm of the broadcasting business is shifting significantly.
That is why I am busy with the task of selecting which dramas and other videos I want to keep. (To be continued)
#10ThingsIWantToDoThisYear
#OrganizingBluRayDiscs
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#RatingPrediction
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