It's actually a fun and interesting real-world distributed computing problem. You need computers w/ TV tuners in every major market across the country in order to get the _local_ broadcast news. The computers then FTP the data back to the central servers.

But you can't easily/cheaply get server racks in 100 cities that have cable TV lines going into the cages.

So you have to find reliable places to put all your distributed computers that have good TV signals, good upstream bandwidth, a person who can help reboot it when it crashes, and reasonable cost.