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In Soviet US, Comcast Watches YOU
cayenne8 sends us to Newteevee.com for a blog posting reporting from the Digital Living Room conference earlier this week. Gerard Kunkel, Comcast's senior VP of user experience, stated that the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into its devices so it can know who's in your living room. Cameras in the set-top boxes, while apparently not using facial recognition software, can still somehow figure out who is in the room, and customize user preferences for cable (favorite channels, etc.). While this sounds 'handy,' it also sounds a bit like the TV sets in 1984. I am sure, of course, that Comcast wouldn't tap into this for any reason, nor let the authorities tap into this to watch inside your home in real time without a warrant or anything."
This would be useful for determining who's on the end of the cable line, using bittorrent. The FBI can then go ahead and break their doors in, during an early-morning no-knock raid.
They can then go ahead and develop technology to determine who's watching the commercials and who isn't... and then apply a flat per-minute fee for not watching advertisements.
Alternatively, they can charge a per-viewer fee for pay-per-view events. After all, if you crap 20 people around your HDTV to watch a $40 boxing event, isn't it logical that you should pay extra for every extra person who's watching it?
Heck, there's all kinds of useful things a company could do with this information.
The RIAA and the MPAA will love this. At last, content can be licensed to the individual, not the device. "Pay per viewer", at last.
And you can't cover the camera; if it can't see you to identify your biometrics, your licenses won't validate.
My box has a firewire port on the back. I plugged it into my laptop once and it was detected as a video for windows device. After digging around for some drivers i was actually able to watch the video coming off the box directly on the laptop. In doing some research for this it looks like all set top boxes made after a specific date are required to have this built in by the FCC.
It would have been even better though if it acted as a tv tuner card that you could use to change channels on the box from the computer.
Many seem to be unaware that it was once illegal not to grow hemp in these here united states.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
then you know what I do? I unplug the fscker, cancel my service [not that I'd deal with comcast in the first place] and go post on slashdot or something. it really isn't that important to watch TV
I know this is going to come as a shock to you non-geezers, but you can watch TV without cable! There's satellite TV (several providers IINM) and good old trusty rabbit ears (my rabbit ears are amplified and deliver a very good picture) or roof antenna.
When I was a kid we only had three channels, and that was in the St Louis Metro area! I'm in dinky little Springfield IL now, and I can pick up nine channels.
Yeah, I could get dozens of channels with cable but so what? When I had cable I didn't watch very many anyway. If there's a program on cable I want to watch I'll go to a bar (I'm usually in one anyway). I used to like The Discovery Channel before they started sucking. Instead of "The Andromeda Galaxy: little known secrets" now there's "Painting race cars: little known secrets". They have ESPN on and there's... championship POKER??? Pool? WTF is next, twiddly winks?
At least when I was a kid there was Ernie Kovacs and Red Skelton. You young whippersnappers don't know what you're missing.
If they impliment this I'm going to have to make another article alomg the lines of Good Riddance to Bad Tech about bad tech we SHOULD get rid of... maybe add it to Dog-Slow Technologies and rename the sucker.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest