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Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

Send a message to Will at spotter@msnbc.com



Lies, damn lies and video searching

Posted: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:39 AM by Will Femia

Speaking of mainstream TV that everyone's talking about online, Fox no doubt got what it was aiming for with its lie detector show "Moment of Truth" when a contestant admitted to cheating on her husband, among other things, for a shot at winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Justice prevails in the end.)

The story in the Post answers some of the questions I had about why the husband didn't just walk off the stage.

More interesting to many Clicked readers (because of course we're above being interested in base reality show scandal) is the Red Lasso video service on which the Moment of Cuckolding clip is hosted. I haven't requested a membership yet, but from the silent instructional video they offer I see they're like a Tivo clip cutting service.

You search for a time range, find the segment you're looking for and cut it to the specific clip you want. From there it behaves like a YouTube video. It's a great idea and the service itself seems pretty good. I can't imagine how they get away with it legally but maybe once they show off what they can do they'll get buy-in from the content providers (or bought-out by the content providers).

As long as we're trying to be highbrow about lying, "find the lie" is a fascinating idea in making students pay attention to class lectures.

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Regarding "The Moment of Truth", I gotta figure that this show will wear out its welcome soon (I was done with it after one episode.)  It's hard to care about someone on a game show and even more so when they are revealing negative things about themselves in order to win more money or, perhaps more likely, no money at all.  This show is almost a Monty Python sketch in its surrealism except that I think the producers intend it to be dramatic, not funny.  Almost every other game show gives you reasons to root FOR the contestant.  What this show offers is that deception, infidelity, etc. will keep you on the stage as long as you are telling the "truth" about it.  And by "truth" they merely mean that your answers match what you gave while wearing various physiological monitoring devices.  

Combine this with the realization that the contests already know what sorts of skeletons were dredged up during the preliminary test and what you have is simply people willing to embarrass themselves and their unknowing friends and family to be on TV and possibly win money.  Viewers tend not to enjoy this kind of thing for very long.

Dan (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 3:08 PM)



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