TV that watches you is on the way
By John Yaukey
Gannett News Service
The idiot box is getting smarter.
Instead of just sitting there while you watch it, your TV may soon start watching back.
If advocates of interactive TV (ITV) have their way, the household tube will record what you watch so programmers can better tailor your viewing experience and advertisers can more precisely focus their efforts.
Indeed, anyone using TiVo, which records TV shows for convenient viewing, is already using an early form of interactive TV. But that's just child's play compared with what some major media players have planned.
ITV works a lot like Internet cookies, those tiny files that leave a trail of easily followed crumbs behind all the Web sites you visit. While cookies have come to be considered a spying tool by many, they were originally designed to make the Internet a more personal experience. And that's how the people developing interactive TV view their emerging technology.
"We are not out to catch people watching porn at 2 a.m.,'' said Devin Hosea, whose Cambridge, Mass., company Predictive Networks, recently teamed up with Microsoft to develop ITV technology. "We don't record exact shows, and we don't profile on sensitive areas like sex.''
Predictive's technology works through cable set-top boxes to record viewing habits. In addition to Microsoft, Predictive is working with Open TV and Liberate, which both make operating systems for ITV set-top boxes. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Digital Democracy, some of the nation's best-known media companies are developing ITV applications, including cable TV giant AT&T, Liberty Media, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (through NDS), A.C. Nielsen and TV Guide (Gemstar). By 2003, the Gartner analysis firm predicts, ITV will have 20 million subscribers.
'Big Brother' fears
This raises eyebrows among privacy advocates. But ITV advocates claim that they're only interested in information that improves the TV experience for consumers.
Predictive's system doesn't record everything a viewer watches, but rather pieces together a "digital silhouette'' of the viewer.
For example, it wouldn't record CBS news but rather merely that you watched the news at a particular time.
The system, however, is sensitive enough that it can differentiate one household viewer from another by their viewing habits and the way they press the buttons on the remote. And indeed, TiVo records what you watch but only to the extent that it knows somebody in a particular Zip code is watching a particular show.
The advantages for consumers include fewer irrelevant ads and customized channel lineups.
The disadvantages?
"Through the development of hardware and software, companies are creating a new TV infrastructure in the U.S. that will engage in unprecedented data collection," the CDD's Jeff Chester wrote in a recent report.
Industry watchers say the popularity among consumers will depend on the privacy climate among other factors.
"Perception is everything,'' said Adam Sarner, an analyst with Gartner. "Consumers will have to have control over it. They'll have to be able to turn it off.''
