« May 2003 | Main | July 2003 »
Monday, June 02, 2003
TiVo sells me out
TiVo Plans to Sell Information on Customers' Viewing Habits: "The information will be gathered in aggregate and filtered through a third party, Mr. Yudkovitz said, so that the habits of individual users will remain anonymous." [via Gothamist because God forbid I should read the paper myself]
I already knew they were going to do this when we signed up for TiVo; it's clear in the Terms of Service what you're getting into, and I think it's probably actually part of the appeal--it's a little like picking yourself to be a Nielsen family. What I'm actually surprised about is that it took them this long to getting around to selling the information.
I feel like I've seen articles on, like, Yahoo News saying that so-and-so's commercial during the Super B0wl was paused and rewound the most times by Tivo users. Were they giving it out for free before? Was the first ratings sheet on the house to get the networks hooked?
Now that I think about it, I guess this means they can tell how many times I looked at Charlie's butt in the first episode of Manor House on PBS. I swear, it was only twice. I couldn't help it. Damn.
Related: American Idle, or the art of knowing everything there is to know about pop culture by saying "oh, I didn't watch that, but I TiVo'd it" and then dashing to one's computer to read about the subject on a myriad of blogs.
Productive morning I'm having at work, eh?
