TV Stocks Online
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 TV Stocks Online march 2007 |
|
| URL | http://www.tvstocksonline.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | no |
| Type of site | private |
| Registration | yes |
| Available language(s): | english |
| Owner | morristreet |
| Created by | Tim Morrison / Shaun Streeter |
| Launched | July 2006 |
| Revenue | n/a |
| Current status | Online |
TV Stocks Online is a Stock Market Prediction simulator that uses television shows, television stars, and studios as it's commodities.
Contents |
[edit] History
TV Stocks Online was developed because there was a gap in online web games. No game seemed to be around that covered Primetime TV. There were webgames that covered stock markets, fantasy markets and sports markets, but nothing seemed to be there for television. Hollywood Stock Exchange was there for movies, and it had a very limited TV range, but that was not it's purpose.
So TV Stocks Online was created to supply the market with a viable web game for playing a TV stock market simulator. The site went live for Beta testing in July 2006, and went fully live in September 2006 in conjunction with the Fall 2006 Primetime Television schedule.
As of March 2007 the site has been remodeled to make it load faster and to improve response times within the simulator itself.
[edit] How It Works
TV Stocks Online keeps track of all the currently airing primetime television shows that are broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and The CW. Information on the show's neilson ratings are collated daily from The Programming Insider by Mark Burman and put into the system in terms of the number of viewers in millions that watched the show the night before. That value then is calculated against the previous entries and a new stock price is generated for the show stock price.
The shows are crosslinked to both the studios that own and air them, and the Actors, Writers, and Directors responsible for them. So as a show's stock price is adjusted, the value of the studio and of the actor stocks linked to it also adjust.
[edit] Results so Far
"As the site has now been running and accumulating trackable data for 8 months it has recorded stock fluctuations and value changes due to Nielsen adjusts for that amount of time. Based on that, studio pricings and show pricings have continued to be inline with both Studio projections and predictions of industry executives. TV Stocks has already shown itself to be a good mirror of the industry and hopefully will continue to do so as long as we keep it up to date." - Tim Morrison
[edit] The Guts of the Project
TV Stocks runs on a php application that was developed for it which has been named Stocks Online. It incorporates MySql databases and also a cron run to do the background calculations. The cron runs in two stages, a run once every 15 minutes to keep the market balanced and process current transactions, and a once a day housekeeping run that does end of day processes including player adjustments, checking for active players, checking to ensure no stock drops below a value of $0 and other adjustments. It has been confirmed that if needed, the cron cycle can be increased as demand for the site rises, to keep the site looking and running at close to real-time.
[edit] Current and Future Changes
Currently, TV Stocks is not only tracking the primetime networks, but is also tracking Reality TV in regards to the contestants each having a stock entry that can be bought and sold. The site is also attempting to keep track of the shows and seris that are in development by the various studios in an attempt to see if a popularity index can be generated on the future shows as well as current TV offerings.
