When you flop down on the sofa to watch TV, your TV may be watching back.
That's the dream of TiVo, anyway. Next week, the Sunnyvale, California, company will roll out a set-top box that lets couch potatoes tailor what they watch -- and lets TiVo collect viewer profiles so advertisers can target ads.
"For the very first time, this creates a truly effective, efficient way to target and measure the effectiveness of ads on TV," said Stacy Jolna, TiVo's vice president of programming. "It's the Holy Grail for Madison Avenue."
It's also a red flag for privacy advocates. "People don't expect their television to be watching them," said Deirdre Mulligan, staff counsel for the Center of Democracy and Technology. "It's like Nielsen gone amuck."
Other vendors, most notably Microsoft's WebTV, are collecting data through the television for ad targeting. Unlike WebTV, however, TiVo is a pure television set-top; it offers no connection to the Web.
"The Internet has been a great warm-up for the real deal, which is interactive television," said Jolna.
Because televisions are so pervasive -- in 99 percent of all US homes -- privacy advocates are leery of any technology that might turn TVs into surveillance devices.
"This is new ground, and it's going to require a lot of work on the part of industry and the privacy community to develop adequate safeguards," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, a nonprofit media-policy research organization.
TiVo's Jolna acknowledged the seriousness of the privacy issues involved, but said privacy advocates shouldn't fear TiVo. "We don't have your personal information. You do. It always stays on your box in your house."
Here's how it works. First, a user buys a US$500 set-top box from TiVo. The box stores television broadcasts in its memory. Users can pause and rewind like a VCR, even in the middle of a live show.
TiVo owners can also preselect and record up to 20 hours of programming. Viewers can enter tastes and preferences, which TiVo can match against the next 14 days of programming. TiVo also can "learn" to select programming a viewer might like. To help TiVo learn, users hit an up or down arrow on their remote to indicate whether they like the show they're watching.
