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Intel To Launch TV Service With Facial Recognition By End of the Year
MojoKid writes "Despite television being a rather tough nut to crack, Intel is apparently hoping that its upcoming set-top box and subscription service will be its golden ticket to delivering more Intel processors to the living room. The service would be a sort of specialized virtual cable subscription that would combine a bundle of channels with on demand content. So what's Intel's killer feature that distinguishes it from the vast and powerful competition? Granular ratings that result in targeted ads. Intel is promising technology in a set-top box that can distinguish who is watching, potentially allowing Intel to target advertising. The technology could potentially identify if the viewer is an adult or a child, male or female, and so on, through interactive features and face recognition technology."
The marketing dweeb bastards won't quit until they force us all to wear burkas or Guy Faulks masks.
Because what we *really* need in the world is a TV that watches you...
So, a cat food commercial will be presented whenever one of my cats enters the room?
In Liberty, Rene
why would any customer want this?
3d print your fathers face and kids will see adult content
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
For zeroing in on what would instantly become the television industry's most hated product. Considering the industry as a whole, that is no small feat!
Electrical tape. Same as for obnoxiously bright LEDs.
I am 44 years old and I grew up with TV. None of my kids watch TV. I do not watch TV. Nobody I know watches TV. The TV is now just a screen in which content which is chosen by the person, at a time specified by the user, is displayed. Yeah, there are still people out there but that whole model of forced advertising is going away. The writing is on the wall.
strike
"The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. [...] The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.[...] It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. "
Via http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
As a member of a former Nielson ratings household, I can say that I always found it incredibly annoying always having to log into a set-top box whenever I turned on the television... plus I seem to recall having to periodically re-log in to the box every hour or so, if I was doing a TV marathon, just so that it would know we weren't just leaving the TV idle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... and let them watch each other. And enjoy the hilarity of seeing them both trying to serve ads to each other. And then implode.
...that whole model of forced advertising is going away. The writing is on the wall.
Yes as we get more affluent and rational we'll be less willing to trade our time watching ads for free or subsidised content, preferring instead to get relevant ads on-demand from search engines, or eschewing ads altogether and learning about things being sold from editorial content that unlike ads doesn't push an agenda by giving you less than the whole truth.
As it runs low on the fuel of poverty and irrationality that sustains it, advertising's currently passing through its bloated red giant stage. The core collapse is imminent. But the white dwarf remnant will remain a slowly diminishing beacon in our culture for many years.
It was not "unmotivated", it was "misdirected". In the same way how fear of black people is misdirected, even though there are plenty of violent criminals among black people.
Yeah, right. Thinking Stalinism was evil is the same as being a bigoted racist. Because most communist states were actually so nice and benevolent. Its only the exceptional ones, like USSR, Maoist China, North Korea, Romania, Albania, that gave all the the others a bad name.
My own politics are very liberal, in American terms, even socialist. But real communism is to be feared. They probably never were a threat to the US in the "Red Menace" way, but they certainly were to their own citizens.
Not only it's absolutely definitely was intended to refer to the society under Communist, or specifically Stalin rule, most Americans' idea of USSR is actually closer to Orwell's fiction than to reality.
Americans' ignorance isn't the fault of Orwell. If he had wanted to pillory communism specifically, he would have done so. He fought against the fascists in Spain, he knew how evil both extremes were. Big Brother could have been a Fascist as easily as a Communist. The labels are irrelevant once they get into power.
I wonder if this has come out of Intel's acquision of Cognovision, and I hope it's better than what they gave developers in 2011. I worked with this product for about a year, attempting to integrate it into our digital signage systems. Not only did it take a dedicated i5 with 2gb of RAM to safely run in the background, it often (as much as 40% of the time) produced the wrong information about a person. Gender was correct about 80% of the time, age was correct in only about 30% of samples, and race was almost never correct (except for very dark skinned folks were alwas called determined to be of African origin).
The result was that we had to write an algorythm to essentially average out samples over a given duration. When we took 500 samples over 5 seconds, dropped the extremes, and averaged the rest we improved the accuracy to nearly 85%, but that is still pretty bad when you consider that automated actions will be taken based on those results (i.e. to play content for YOUR demographic).
I don't really want my TV watching me.
-MoG