Slashdot Mirror
ReplayTV To Track Viewing Habits
drwiii writes: "This article over at CNN talks about a deal between Nielsen and ReplayTV to develop technology to track time-shifted viewing habits. The ReplayTV unit doesn't have software to track viewing choices, but it looks like it'll be getting it now. The article also touches on Nielsen's relations with TiVo and Microsoft (WebTV)." Fantastic. Now I'll expect junk mail every time I linger a little too long over Buffy . I think that if these machines are going to be used for market research, the networks should pay the bill, and they should be free to everyone.
I suppose the usual slashdot paranoids will come out and start whinging about privacy. But who really cares if some 15-year old linux zealot is watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Pokemon ? Does anyone care ?
This could also lead to quicker retirement of unpopular programs, meaning that we don't have to put up with rubbish for so long. I mean, wouldn't it be great if moronic shows like "Friends" had been canned after the first series because nobody was watching ?
Also maybe they would not have finished off Married with Children so quickly if they knew how many tech-savvy geeks with high disposable income were tuning in...
Think about it. This is a no-lose situation.
In Europe, privacy is regulated: There are national and european laws detailing what can and can't be done with your personal profile.
The US approach is different and betting on self-regulation in the market. Self-regulation could work, if personal profiles were a thing you, the person being profiles, owned. That is not the case: Your profile is owned by anyone who care to profile you.
Markets can regulate anything that has a price. As long as your profile does not have a price, as long as companies do not need to pay for taking your profile, and as long as you can't sue them if they do without having a contract with you, self-regulation does not work.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Well, several things. First of all, the goal of targetted advertising and television ratings is to sell you stuff. It isn't to challenge, educate, broaden horizons, or install a sense of community or civic duty. If someone is white supremacist survivalist, they are going to get a steady diet of gun commercials and right wing commentators, reinforcing their beliefs rather than educating them about alternative views. This subverts the medium of television even further than it already has been subverted.
But there are other concerns, too. In communist countries and Nazi Germany, people would get picked up and thrown in jail based on inferences about their ideology, derived from the flimsiest pieces of evidence: books they read, newspaper clippings they kept, remarks they made to friends.
Of course, something as blatant and crude as that doesn't seem like it's in the cards in the short term for the US (well, unless the religious right wins).
Things are likely to be much more subtle in the US. Data mining programs will make inferences from your viewing habits, possibly combined with your shopping habits, about lots of aspects of your life. Are you a home gardener or are you growing pot? How sexually active are you? What's your likelihood of developing heart disease? Are you a dangerous driver? Are you financially responsible?
This kind of data could be used to determine your insurance rates, credit worthiness, school admissions, job eligibility, propensity to engage in drug use or other criminal behavior, etc. To the insurance company, police, employer, or school, it's only statistical averages that matter: if you move to the top of their list, they'll make your life difficult. And for the individual, it will be difficult to prove that anything unusual has happened; in fact, this kind of analysis isn't illegal as long as it isn't used as a proxy for race.
There are massive personal data collections going on, and with good statistical techniques, anybody with the money to purchase the data will be able to get statistically excellent information on you. You can bet that this data won't just be used for targetted advertising: the economic incentives to use it for credit ratings, insurance, law enforcement/profiling, and employment are simply too strong. And you can also bet that if your are a bit unusual or excentric (and who on Slashdot isn't?), you'll pop out of those statistical models, either as a bad risk to be avoided, or as a likely suspect to be examined, even if your excentricities are completely harmless.
Allowing this kind of data collection to proceed is setting a dangerous precedent. I think the Europeans are right in essentially prohibiting any on-line data collection that isn't associated directly with a business transaction and requiring all data to be erased when the business transaction is over (airlines aren't even permitted to keep your meal preferences in their databases). Will the US have to learn the hard way to be careful when it comes to privacy?
Nobody's really going to be able to stop companies who make these boxes from tracking what shows you watch, especially when they're constantly dialing up some other computer to exchange information. I don't really mind if those TV executives know what show I'm watching either, as long as I'm anonymous. When they start attaching a name and other info to your statistics, then it's a bit of a privacy violation, but anonymous statistics are a good thing. It DOES help TV executives sculpt their programming better. There's only a very small fraction of the population who are Neilsen families. And, getting free service out of it would be good too. :)
:)
Of course, as soon as IPv6 is implemented, super-high-quality MPEG4 internet-TV stations will take over, and TV will be a thing of the past, so enjoy it while it lasts.
---
Epitaph
Anyway, it's set "20 minutes into the future" in a world where TV ratings are updated instantly on charts in the TV exec board rooms and they make quick decisions on the fly about what to do, yank, and manipulate to try to get those instant ratings up. The show's lead character is Edison Carter, a investigative news reporter who juggles reporting the truth over pressures from his bosses at "Network XXIII" to skew the stories to get the ratings up. Reminds me of the TiVo story!
In this world, it's against the law to turn off your TV. Really great stuff. Once in a while, a network like A&E will run a marathon of the shows. I have most of them on tape from the 80s (and still fairly viewable).
The show rocked, but got cancelled because it was playing against Miami Vice and Dallas and in the end, ironically, the poor ratings killed it in its first season.
Anyhoo--product placement, formerly just big business on the big screen, is rapidly encroaching on a small screen near you. Did you notice how all those snazzy flat screen monitors behind the nurses station on E.R. suddenly became Gateway brand snazzy flat screen monitors?
For the most part, Nielsen currently only looks at what whole shows you watch. If Nielsen starts observing your viewing habits that closely, there's nothing to prevent them from knowing what scenes you watch most closely, pause, rewind, FFF on through, that sort of thing. After analyzing that data, Buffy will eventually consist entirely of vampires dying to reveal Pepsi machines right behind them, Buffy holding a Pepsi can right next to her breasts, and Buffy giving that redhead a long, meaningful sip out of her Pepsi.
If we keep this up long enough, all we'll ever see on Buffy is the redhead licking Pepsi out of Buffy's navel.
I have to say I have mixed feelings about this. I'll save a bundle on porno, to be sure, but I can pretty much kiss quality television goodbye.
Creepy possibility #2: combine blue-screen technology, a huge demographics database, product placement, broadband and pointcasting all together to make sure that viewers from seven to thirteen see the redhead licking Kool-Aide out of the navel; from fourteen to twenty see Pepsi; from twenty-one to thirty it's Budweiser; from thirty to forty it's Guinness for men, or Amstel Light for women and all households which have purchased diet products in the last year; and from forty to fifty it's Scotch for households making over $100k/year, gin for $50k to $99k, and Bud for everything else. On pay-per view, you can watch the same show and instead of a flavored beverage, it's semen.
Maybe I won't save on pornography after all.
--
This is not my sandwich.
The first generation units had a FireWire port on the back...which would have made ReplayTV the perfect FireWire capture device (to this day, I still cannot find a external FireWire-to-TV device, even though there are a crapload of USB ones).
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But guess what? Networks were concerned that someone would record show and then upload them onto the Internet. Guess what anyone under the sun can already do with existing capture cards? Duh. So one of the best features gets thrown out the window.
Not to mention that the main reason TiVo et. al. suck is that they are not user-upgradeable. Do I really need to pay some company $300 to put in a freakin IDE hard drive for me? Do I really need to pay $300 for a hard drive that would cost me maybe $150? This is blatently ripping off the consumer. With an external port OF ANY KIND it should be possible to store an infinite amount of video to CD-R/RW, DVD-RAM, hard disk, ZIP, whatever. But no...by removing the port, you force the consumer to follow your official pricing schedule. True, you can crack it open and Ghost the image to a bigger drive, but there goes the warantee.
ReplayTV almost had my business, but by choosing to be slave to the network interests, they have forever lost power users as their audience. I strongly encourage that anyone thinking about buying a replay TV go out and shop for a really high quality capture card instead.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Nielsen ratings are directly used to determine what programs stay on TV and what programs don't. Frankly, I think it would be great if the insipidly backwards, 1950s-style Nielsen Ratings system were updated to take into account today's technology.
:-)
As long as all the "tracking features" are disclosed up-front, this is a great advance. I'd buy one of these units just to get my "vote" for the shows I love a chance to be heard. As it is, so few "Nielsen Families" exist that I seriously question the integrity of the very ratings system which determines what programs I get to watch--low ratings, as you know, mean a show will get the axe. Currently, less than 25,000 households from only the top 48 markets get a "vote" in the ratings game.
This would be a first step towards perhaps changing that limited, closed, backwards system. I'm surprised that Nielsen hasn't gotten together with TV manufacturers to work out a deal--there would be even greater possibilities for revolutionizing the system if that were to happen.
This is just a small first step--only ReplayTV users, as the article says, in already-established Nielsen families, are going to have their usage habits tracked. But imagine the possibilities this could lead to, if the Nielsen people are encouraged:
Imagine a world in which your ReplayTV or TiVo, or even your television set, had a built-in modem and a small chipset designed to record your program choices and upload them once a week. You could choose whether to plug in your modem or not, so no privacy issues would be involved--consumers would boycott a "mandatory" feature like that, but welcome a voluntary one. Then, your viewing choices would have the chance to affect what shows stay on the air and which get nixed, whereas now your viewing habits have no value whatsoever since you're not a Nielsen family. I much prefer this model, than having a scant few families (relatively speaking) which supposedly represent some bonehead's idea of a statistical sampling, deciding which shows survive. I miss *My So-Called Life* and *Freaks and Geeks*, dammit!
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It would be quite easy for this thing to record and transmit everything from which TV shows you watch to which commercials you fast forward through. And since you have an account with them, this info isn't anonymous; it's tied directly to you.
Also, even if the initial offering only transmits requested info, this is a computer. Updating it to transmit additional info is likely a small download in the middle of the night while you're snuggled trustingly in your bed.
Also, I would HATE customized commercials. There's an IBM (I think) commercial which shows a bunch of people sitting around talking about getting inappropriate advertisements. An apartment dweller gets ads for replacement windows; a cat owner gets dog food ads, etc. As they're talking, they're being watched by suits through one-way glass. The consumers turn towards the glass and yell something like "Hey! Isn't anybody listening?!" Then there's a blurb about software which can help you identify your custormer and maintain info on them. The song playing in the back ground is "Getting To Know You."
I though this was one of the most chilling things I'd ever seen. I don't want some advertisement agency watching what I do, what I own, what I buy. I don't want IBM or any other company to get to know me. I don't want some faceless entity, whether it's a person or a computer program, choosing which commercials I should watch. I don't want DoubleClick keeping track of which web pages I visit. Just stay the fsck out of my life!
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
"Now, at this point I should say something about privacy. TiVo guarantees that they neither monitor nor report your TV watching habits and preferences. All taste matching is reportedly done on your local machine, and no such data is sent back to TiVo. While I can't verify that claim, I will note that they are vigilant in making it clear that they respect your privacy."
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
User: Hmmm lets watch something different tonight...... Ahh channel 'whatever' is doing a report about the microsoft case.
Sound of user zapping with remote
ReplayTV9000: I'm sorry user I can't do that.
Sound of user trying it again
ReplayTV9000: I'm sorry user I can't do that. You have tried to watch anti-microsoft propaganda twice, this has been reported to Emporer Gates. Prepare to be terminated.
Grtz, Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
And for those thinking of commenting about how Replay is intending to use this information to figure out what other shows you might be interested in, this is simply a local extension to the technology. I mean if the system's already built to keep track of some of the things you like to watch, even if it doesn't relay this information, it's only natural to think about using it for your own entertainment.
If you're really worried about the evil set-top boxes sending details about the porn you watch, why don't you just keep from plugging it into the phone line?
Again, this is not evil Big Brother tracking technology here. It's pretty clear that it's being done on a volunteer basis.
Do you people even know who Nielson is?
They are a company that takes volunteers and asks them to report on their TV watching habits. Some times this takes the form of transient "diaries", other times it's in the form of a permanent "box". This information is used to determine what a complete cross-section of America is watching at any given time.
The only thing they're doing in this case is working with Replay to figure out a way to adapt this system for their time-delayed product, where real-time ratings don't quite mean as much. At the moment, they're just ignoring the Replay market, but as this has the potential to affect the way we watch TV, and as shows we might ordinarily miss are now within our viewing abilities, it affects the show's ratings as well.
This is a typical YRO article. Someone shouts "tracking habits!" and Slashdot authors pick it up, frothing at the mouth.
Come on, people, do you really think a VCR-like device is going to SELL when it dials up every night and reports your every TV watching habit? This is utter BULLSHIT, and I'm quite sick of it. There is certainly a privacy angle to this, but I would THINK that anybody volunteering to report on the shows they watch would be aware of these issues in the first place.
PLEASE do a bit of research on your own, and DO NOT take the word of these YRO "authors" as gospel. They are quite frequently WRONG in their assessment of the situation, in many cases negligently so.