Television as a medium is growing and changing at a rapid pace these days. Never before have we been presented with so many choices. Digital cable has allowed for more channels in the same space and the Internet is increasing the video content available exponentially. What is needed is a way to organize all this new media that is available to us so we are not overwhelmed by the vast amount of choices. Methods currently being used in the Web 2.0 sphere to organize products/websites/music/etc. can be applied to television watching to give us a more personalized and meaningful experience. My idea is to create an Ambient TV system that will be utilize some of these Web 2.0 tools that have emerged such as collaborative filtering and aspects of social networking and apply them to the traditional medium of television viewing. My goal is to show how TV can evolve and merge with the new technologies and provide a new, customized viewing experience.

LastFM
Democracy Viewer
Amazon Unbox and Tivo
\"The Long Tail\" by Chris Anderson in Wired magazine in October 2004
Shelly Palmer\'s Television Disrupted
TV Week, March 5, 2007 Viewership Moves Out of Living Room

For my thesis, I intend to create a design document describing my ambient TV system along with a rigged prototype demonstrating its key features. The prototype will be made using Flash, PHP, mySQL and XML.