[IP] more on Coming to TV: ads about you
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] Coming to TV: ads about you
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 19:17:55 -0500
From: Andrew Lippman <lip@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
References: <43838E82.9080005@xxxxxxxxxx>
For IP, if interested.
With respect to ads about you:
The notion that a broadcaster radiates a signal with no respect for
whether anyone is interested in receiving it is a waste of spectrum,
energy, and time. It doesn't make sense to my students at all --
some think it is the equivalent of spam. Personally, I never
understood why over-the-air broadcasters don't listen, but a back
channel makes perfect sense for cable.
When I watched the 2000 election returns at CBS, in New York, by
11:30PM, it seemed perfectly clear that Dan Rather would learn little
more that night, so he simply ought to have told his audience to "go
to bed, and if anything important happens, I'll call you..." But he
couldn't.
It's also potentially beneficial to narrowcast advertising. Twenty
years ago, a Peabody, Mass., cable system tested phone-in requests
for ads that were then queued on three dedicated channels. People
did it. Many ads are both interesting and informative the first time
you see them; some countries used to place them all at the ends of
programs and people willingly remained tuned in. I might consider
explicitly telling "The Daily Show" or CBS what I wanted my ad
profile to be like. I'd even write a program to keep it current:
"tell me about energy-saving thermostats real soon..."
It's quite a different matter to monitor what you view from a
recorder, and quite another matter to take information without
asking, and this is indeed an assault on commonly accepted norms of
privacy with respect to television viewing. There is no reason for
those norms to change or be dictated by the provider. It won't last
as such when we start watching TV off the internet anyway.
The fix is simple. Just open the recorder architecture and the users
might make something good out of this. A back channel can't be a bad
idea in principle. In this case, it is not the technology that is
awry, it is the business plan.
Andy Lippman
MIT Media Lab
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