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Sensor To Monitor TV Watchers Demoed At Cable Labs
An anonymous reader writes "Cable operators at the semi-annual CableLab's Innovation Showcase have informally voted as best new product a gizmo that can determine how many people are watching a TV. Developed by Israeli company PrimeSense, the product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world (the images look like something from thermal imaging). In other words, that cable set-top box will know whether three people are sitting on the sofa watching TV and how many are adults vs. children. Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? It all happens via a chip that resides in a camera that plugs into the set-top box."
I can see some obvious uses here that I hope never happen, like, "Sorry, but you only purchased one ticket to your pay-per-view movie, and three people are watching! Purchase additional tickets or ask some of the viewers to leave."
Of course, even if it gets that bad, I suspect it'd be defeated with something like duct tape. So, while it's kind of evil that someone might want to do this, I'm not all that worried that it would actually work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Of course, even if it gets that bad, I suspect it'd be defeated with something like duct tape. .
And then the box detects its 'blind' and refuses to run your movie, or worse, calls the MPAA for a violation of terms, and perhaps some 'circumvention prevention law' they will have bought by then, bringing down the black van onto your home..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
.. tell if I get a hard-on watching Jessica Biel?
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Ratings companies like Nielsen have been using "people meters" for years now. However the current technology relies on household members pressing a button to register their presence in the room. Nielsen experimented with infrared sensors over twenty years ago. Trust me, this is hardly new technology.
Of course, becoming a member of one of the Nielsen meter panels depends on your agreeing to participate. A system where one is automatically monitored by a set-top box with or without prior agreement raises enormous privacy issues. I'd assume if this takes off it'll just be another one of the 175 clauses contained in your "agreement" with the cable operator.
A few weeks ago I unplugged my cable box as an experiment. You know, just to get an idea of what that would actually do to my life.
I did notice a difference. The difference was that I spent more of my time doing things that were actually rewarding, like reading the book I'd wanted to get to, learning to play a few pieces of music I'd been wanting to work on, and writing down my thoughts on life the universe and everything. In short, it's a lot better for me, for my eyes, for my health, and my sleep schedule.
So with the use of cable boxes to spy on me, it's time for me to get on the phone, get through arguing with the poor call center rep, and get rid of the problem for good.
I am officially gone from
My roommate and I decided to try a no TV policy in our dorm room at the start of my second year of college.
That was 7 years ago, and I never went back to watching TV.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
that if you could get the internal memos on this, it would turn out that the idea is to be able to charge a per-viewer fee. In the same way that ASCAP is threatening lawsuits if you don't have a public performance license for the ringtone on your cell phone.
IIRC I read this in one of Lawrence Lessig's books.
Movie studio executives, of course, hated the idea of home video. Their business model was tied to getting paid for each showing, payment per showing, and also per viewer; the rents charged to movie theatres were set on a sliding scale based on the seating capacity of the house).
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
They demonstrated it proudly to Disney execs who said, dismissively, "This is no good to us. We have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are in the room."
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funny, just today I cancelled my direct-tv sub.
it was 'on hold' (their way of trying to keep you as a sub) for 6mos. a postcard came today saying it would auto-renew (how nice of them) if I didn't call to make other plans. like cancel.
I was on the phone for a hour with their 'retentions' dept.
in short, I told them: drm killed the deal. I've had my tivo content locked up whenever a motherboard in the tivo breaks. the hard drives are locked (unless you hack around it, if you even can). the phone rep tried to convince me to use the analog hole. lol! on an HD dvr, no less. yeah, sure, I'll PAY for HD service and then copy the data out of the 75ohm composite rca jack in SD format, letterboxed, fit into a 4:3 frame and poorly transcoded. yeah, right.
so it was kind of funny that this topic came up. one of the things I told the phone rep guy was that I was not happy about even having my keypresses logged (anon or not, I don't care). when I press 'play' I don't need a data record sent home telling you that.
so I cancelled. took an hour of my time on the phone (I did want to give that guy as much of an earful as he was trying to give me!) - but I'm now done with broadcast tv. its netflix for me, for now on. no remote 'loggers' when I spin a silver disc!
broadcast tv is dying. I give it 10 yrs more, tops, before IP broadband takes completely over.
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Possibly will watch? We were watching you back in 2004-2006 when I was there. I was pulling data from set top boxes that showed what channel you were on and the time stamps when you changed. Heck even the Pause FFW and REW date and time stamps are available in the box.
I could aggregate the data and tell you if I cross referenced to the Schedules could tell you the probability of a child or adult were watching. If I further was able to access the billing records and the demographics collected on the customer I could get even more accurate data.
The camera simply reduces the margin of error from 35% to 5% and gives you a number of viewers.
Granted, this will fail for most rich people's homes. As their cable boxes are in the media racks stuffed in the Utility room.
The version that took pictures of viewers never got used in customers' homes. The legal department was seriously concerned about how to write an agreement regarding the use of those images. I certainly have to wonder whether Comcast's legal department has looked at what needs to be added to the terms of service, and what the privacy requirements will be. If I believe my spouse has been cheating on me, can I get access to what was observed while I was out of town?
The members of the research group and I did have some odd conversations about whether the viewer snapshots should be disabled based on which channel was being watched...
Unfortunately, this sort of thing - "Proles! Welcome Big Brother into your home! Allow our cameras/microphones/tracking devices into your lives! We will give you shiny things!" - is becoming ever more common.
Where I am (Central KS) the radio stations are running an ad, trying to drum up "volunteers" to for "an exciting study of a potential new way to fund the highway system". Guess what: they want people to voluntarily submit to putting a GPS logger on their car, to track where they drive, for the purpose of "usage-based taxation". The very idea of which "makes me ill and angry" to quote The Outer Limits! But the idea that people, rather than rising up with metaphorical pitchforks and torches, are VOLUNTEERING to have this ... Folks, we are on the downhill slide - get used to it.
Or rather, DON'T get used to it! Fight it at every step!
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