Hacker Cinema
MasterChef
2010 · TV series · 16 seasons
Created by Franc Roddam
This hit cooking competition series sees award-winning chef Gordon Ramsay and other celebrity chefs put a group of contestants through a series of challenges and elimination rounds, in order to turn one home cook into a culinary master.
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5 comments on Hacker News
I tried this for a while with ErsatzTV and really loved it. I don’t have cable anymore but I remember fond memories of cycling through channels as a child.
I set up a food channel that would cycle through Masterchef and a few travel cooking shows, one for anime and one for Bollywood movies.
It was incredibly enjoyable. I could just put on a channel after work without having to consciously make a decision on what to watch. Just watch whatever’s on the channel and switch over to something else if it didn’t click!
Definitely going to try this out on my NAS.
It’s specifically endorsement they care about. Reviewing can be an endorsement if you say what you liked about the product. A critique wouldn’t need an ad placement.
If you watch e.g. Masterchef, they are very coy with how they phrase their product placements. They don’t endorse, they say something like “X contestant will have no problem getting up to temp on their stove” as the camera pans over the logo. They don’t spend longer than maybe 3 seconds featuring it. As far as I can tell, TV and movies play by the same rules, they just know what boundaries to not cross.
I'm reminded of an episode of Masterchef where the cooks are given live crabs to prepare a dish with (as part of the meal, not as an assistant). Most contestants left the crab alone until it was time to boil them. One starts ripping the crab apart. Gordon Ramsay had to come up to her and explain that the crab was alive and what she was doing constituted torture.
Many chefs in high end restaurants won't accept a microwave. Michel Roux Jr even complained when contestants used them on British TV show Masterchef.
This is where Netflix ratings really shine. The Big Lebowski on my Netflix profile shows as five red stars. On my wife's, it's two red stars. Netflix guesses that I would really like the movie, while they don't think my wife would enjoy it much at all. And that's completely true. However, they give her a rating of five red stars for Masterchef, a show she actually loves. They give me four red stars, because I've rated other reality shows and other cooking shows lower in the past.
So if Yelp had that kind of thing, this person rated McDonald's highly, they'll probably like Burger King. This person liked Subway but hated McDonalds, so they'll probably like Jimmy John's but not Wendy's. Even more specifically, this person liked Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich, they'll probably like Subway's sriracha buffalo chicken sub.
That's the kind of investment and innovation that drivers user interaction.