Business idea: Customized service to notify a fan it is worth watching the game

Recording sports and watching them on my own time & terms is transformational. I think I would watch 90% less sports if I had to suffer through them in real-time.

I am also very much in the anti-spoilers camp. I know not everybody has the same viewpoint, but I am hardcore about it. The downside, though, is you lose the flexibility of entirely skipping a worthless game.

I can imagine a service that uses a combination of machine-learning and user-configuration parameters to notify a user if a given game is worth watching on the DVR. The user could set various parameters such as:

• My team wins (I personally don't include this one, but some people do).
• The score is close at the end.
• The score is close most of the game.
• The game involves a reasonable amount of scoring.
• The scoring is not all on penalty kicks (I'm looking at you, futbol) or home runs (baseball).

Also, the result wouldn't be a pure yes-no, although that would be an option. There would be an overall rating underneath the yes-no. So if you are me, a spoiler hater, you might want just the yes-no, because the score could give something away. But if you are on the fence or particularly busy, maybe you want an indication if it is a really good game, not just good enough to be a generally enjoyable watch.

Then there are all kinds of ways you could incorporate statistical and machine-learning elements, to adjust the rating. Just scratching the surface:

• Higher rating if many other people with profiles similar to yours rated the game highly.
• Lower the rating if you identify that you accidentally found out the result (lower still if you know the score).
• Use ML to adjust the rating based on your own ratings of past games.

Then also enhanced features such as telling you how far to skip ahead, or to skip to the last few minutes.