Tivo: Super Britney Replays Ruled "While millions of Americans watched the annual pro football championship, TiVo was monitoring the viewing habits of 10,000 of its 280,000 subscribers. The leading maker of digital video recorders used its technology to analyze which football plays or TV ads its subscribers chose to view again or to see in slow motion. TiVo viewers did more instant replays of Super Bowl commercials than of the game itself, and the Pepsi ads featuring Spears were the MVP, said John Ghashghai, TiVo's director of audience research.... When gathering customer marketing research, TiVo says it does not link viewer data to names, gender or age, only into one big database that can identify users by ZIP code." [in Wired News]
Two questions. First, did Tivo users know they were being tracked? Second, did ReplayTV do this? My guess is "no, not really" to the first question, and "no, probably not" to the second. Tivo is explicitly trying to woo over the TV networks and advertisers (I'm sure sharing of market research is in their license agreement), while SonicBlue (the company that owns ReplayTV now) is more focused on the consumer. Does anybody have a definitive answer?
Will we see this kind of tracking technology in eBooks? Counts sent to the publisher for which pages a user bookmarks, which passages are highlighted, how many times a quote is used?
8:11:25 AM 
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