Technology firms and advertisers for years have been trying to figure out how to use cloud technology and digital data to curate programming tailored to individual viewers. Zone TV, which has offices in Santa Monica and Toronto, on Monday announced the latest experiment in that pursuit. The company plans to launch a group of 14 subscription video-on-demand television channels, including Foodies, Great Outdoors, Motors, Stylers, Mancave and Playground for children. The twist: rather than employing TV executives to program the channels, Zone TV said it uses artificial intelligence to select and serve videos to individual viewers. Zone TV said it has secured license agreements with various content owners, including NASA, the production firm behind the children's show "Bob the Builder," and traditional magazine publishers including Field & Stream and Outdoor Life to construct a small library of programming.

You might think it would be easy for political appointees to rally against something as unpopular as the monthly fees that cable and satellite TV services charge for their converter boxes -- particularly when federal law requires them to do something about it. Sadly, the opposite has been true for the Federal Communications Commission, which was instructed by Congress in 1996 to develop rules that would end the effective monopoly that pay-TV providers hold over set-top boxes. Years of work produced a klugey and poorly supported "CableCard" system to allow devices to perform the functions of a cable set-top, but it certainly hasn't produced the explosion of choices that lawmakers had hoped to create. Good luck finding a TV set with a CableCard slot. In the latest turn of the screw, new Chairman Ajit Pai put the commission's most recent (and highly controversial) set-top box proposal in limbo, which in this case appears to be a way station on the road to eternal damnation. That proposal would have required pay-TV providers to make their services available through a standardized app that could run on a variety of major consumer-electronics devices.