The Future of Charitable Telethons

Media and Entertainment Interest Group,

Hello. I am pleased to share some preliminary technological ideas to enable the future of telethons with respect to streaming services.

A telethon is a televised fundraising event that lasts many hours or even days, the purpose of which is to raise money for a charitable, political, or other cause. According to Wikipedia, "most telethons feature heavy solicitations for pledges by masters of ceremonies or hosts, who are often local celebrities or media personalities combined with variety show style entertainment such as singers, bands, and instrumentalists. In some cases, telethons feature content related to the cause being supported, such as interviews with charitable beneficiaries, tours of charity-supported projects, or pre-taped sequences."

Technology ideas include that, as streaming services already have users' payment information, making donations to charitable causes during streaming telethons could be made a simple and elegant user experience. Users could, for instance, utilize their smart remotes to navigate menus to make donations of 1, 5, 10, or 20 dollars. Additionally, users watching a streaming telethon in a Web browser could simply click to navigate a menu to do so. In addition to using their default payment methods, users could choose to enter other, secondary, forms of payment as desired. Perhaps streaming telethons could each have configuration screens or streaming services could enable configuration for the charitable telethon content type.

These technology topics, enabling new, simple, and elegant user experiences for making donations to charitable causes are interesting to me. So too are how modern streaming services might implement telethons, in terms of content, for those charitable causes of their or their event organizers' determinations. In addition to providing traditional forms of telethon content to draw audiences, perhaps other forms of enticing content could include making available first access to new trailers showcasing forthcoming series and movies.

Thank you. I hope that these ideas are also of some interest to you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski