Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Watching What You Watch
Arkham writes "According to this Wired article, Microsoft
has contracted with a company called Predictive Networks to track the viewing habits of Microsoft TV devices. The Predictive software creates a "Digital Silhouette" that is described as being able "to tell them that Joe watches a lot of baseball, likes Situation Comedies, and
responds favorably to commercials that use humor."." I've always said
that I'm cool with my Tivo tracking what I watch, provided it never tells
anyone my name and address to anyone.
If it meant I watched more
targetted advertisements, I'd fast forward less.
Wired blew this story. Microosft did not announce anything. Predictive were the guys who issued the release and basically all they said is "we're building our stuff to work on the MS TV platform". That's it. No big brother built in to ultimateTV.
I think they said it can create a 'profile' based on remote control usage, so it the remote is doing a lot of channel surfing and stops at a particular show and some ad, it can record that "user 1 likes such-and-such", then another user may only change channels between shows or whatever and records what on during that useage pattern. Kinda like analyzing how different people type to distinguish who's at the keyboard, a hunt-and-pecker or a speed typist - then they can record what content is being typed for two different users even tho they don't id by logging in, retina scan or whatever.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Somewhere in it (or one of the previous bills) you have received "terms of service and privacy notice". That clearly says your cable company is collecting the data and shares it with affiliates "to provide better service" ("this call can be monitored for quality assurance"). In other words, they do know how much time you spent watching Enterprise and fact that you flipped channel during commercials. Why nobody screams about that? And lining up all "affiliates" of cable company will lead to a whole lot of companies that they have business relationship with.
:)
p.s. as MSNBC is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC, they do get report from your cable company on how much time you've spent watching them (so cable company would be able to calculate costs/pay adequately). Question is how detailed that report is now and how detailed it will be but nothing prevents "single user" report from cable company. Read the fine print
Hyperom.com
However, there's a reason why I actually like Tivo's data collection. I think Taco's dreaming a bit as far as actual targeted ads go (at least for now), but there's a more important benefit: Aggregate viewing statistics are more or less what're commonly referred to as "ratings". Ratings determine whether shows live or die. They determine how much many a network gets from a show's advertisers. This, in turn, determines how much money goes into a show's budget. It should be obvious why having my viewing habits correlate with TV studio's spending is A Good Thing.
To provide a slightly more concrete example, however, I give you "Family Guy". It's a funny show, it has a decent geek following, and it runs in a time-slot that's otherwise dominated by stupid reality TV. The network it's on, Fox, keeps playing the stupid game of repeatedly cancelling the show and then bringing it back. Apparently, they decided that last week's ratings were going to decide whether or not they cancel the show yet again. I recorded the show on my Tivo and watched it. Assuming that Fox subscribes to Tivo's viewer information, that's one more vote in the "Keep it on the air, dammit" column. Even better, given that viewer statistics are collected from a relatively small portion of the viewing public, it's a disproportionately large vote.