I'm looking forward to hearing an admin confirmation on this matter as I agree....it would be extremely useful.
But in the meantime, you can go, depending on how long they're on the screen I guess? But sort of go, "Hmm... you were on blah show/ KMB Saturday night, weren't you?" And then act with prejudice or hero worship, etc etc etc...
At least you can look at the screen and see who's on it, even if you don't catch their name ICly or description of what they look like.
Instead, I'll simply offer this to that hypothetical situation, Jinx; the hypothetical situation you presented is currently not supported by the game. Sure, Television (especially the KMB broadcast*) creates some pretty horrendous player habits from my experience, however that is in no part due to giving too much power to display names (which are not unique, and should not be used as identifiers) and offering no way to quickly distinguish between an attractive NPC midget Latino Bill or an attractive NPC 500 pound muscle-grafting Asian Bill. Your hypothetical situation would instead be supported with 'look at person on TV', allowing actual lookalikes to be mistaken for one another, as opposed to people who are not even tangentially the same and make the observant look out of their mind.
Besides, on a tangent, I don't think the problem of people calling out people they actually saw on TV is particularly vain or immersion-breaking. There are tens of millions of people around any number of us in real-life. When we see somebody we know appear on TV, it's pretty friggin' obvious, and the instances that it's a true lookalike seem to be less-so than them just being... somebody we know on TV. Turns out, it's fairly easy to visually ID somebody you know intimately and true instances of lookalikes even in population centers isn't that common. Just in the same way you'll often hear, 'Hey, I saw you at x the other day!' or even 'Hey, I saw you in (other city) the other day!'. Again, there are some feeds that are simply far too busy to be offering any real chance to identify any one player in the crowd, let alone glean entire conversations in every intricate detail, but I think people not being able to control what information they use IC from Television is another issue entirely.
* Public OOC information available on The Mind.
.smooth my hands over my sapphire micro-dress.
.run my fingers through my long dark red hair.
I'm not sure how meta it is or anything. It just works to let people know what they are seeing on a television so they can respond to it. "Hey, that dress looks good on you." "Nice hair."
I'm not sure if it's wrong or not, it's just what I do and it's been useful.
Now:
I will look into this and see if I can either come up with a novel approach or the willingness to just grind on it till the problem as presented is solved. No guarantees.
Aside: Imagine the frustration you'd have if someone told you that this actually did work, once, in the past, at some point, and might even work now, if you as a player only knew how to make it do so. That was what happened to me, when I was noob. Ha.
I don't see us gaining the ability to look at blank and see a more detailed description of items and people that are in a scene. Not in the near future. But we can make it something that content producers are icly driven to do for a good show.
It might seem a little overdone sitting around in the Drome.. but if you know you're on TV and you also know OOCly people can't actually 'see' you..
Think, like. Acting. On a stage. They exaggerate a bit so people in the back can see what's going on.
Examples:
If you have recognizable custom gear, 'tease' it so people can see it.
If you have long curly blonde hair with ribbons and shit all tied in it, shake it out and play with the ribbons.
I think you can see peoples @lp if you 'look' at a TV screen too. So. Set that to be descriptive even. Pick something that stands out a lot.
@look_place is a blue-eyed, skull tattooed party animal.
@look_place is a German hot mess with a black eye, smokin' a fat spliff.
Simple stuff. Helps a lot I think. Maybe.