Where’s my tinfoil? Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, Gerard Kunkel, apparently wants to put a camera in your cable box and use it to serve ads.
From NewTeeVee:
If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.
The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes.
Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads.
Do not want. New TeeVee also has a video interview with Mr. Kunkel in which he talks about the TiVo rollout in Boston and other cableriffic topics. Seems like a nice guy, but I wouldn’t let him put a camera in my living room.
Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You? [NewTeeVee] (Thanks, Graham!)
(Photo:cmorran123)
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With this or similar technology, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’re going to pay more money for cable if your home is not offering up the right demographic to advertisers. If your home is offering up the right “body type” during the right shows, and they do not leave the room, then you may be offered substantial discounts on cable. The other end of that is you only watch PBS and CSPAN and you’re single, and you leave the room during commercials when you do watch commercial TV. Then you’ll find that your cable bill does not get those discounts, but instead you are asked to pay more. It’ll all be in the new service agreements.
If my cable company wants to watch me I’ll be more than happy to give them a show. I like being watched.
Now this is just plain unfair to all of the other companies who entered the “Worst Company in America” contest. Is Comcast going that far out of their way to try to win this thing?
@friendlynerd: I was just going to say… there truly is no problem that duct tape can’t fix.
DO. NOT. EFFING. WANT.
And if I am changing in my room and the cable box sees me naked after uh, being in cold water? Will the TV then show Extenz adds?
Mr. Kunkel can shove the fucking camera up his ass. Not that anyone would want to see what’s going up in there. Really I hope those Wimps at FCC hurt Comcast somehow.
@SVreader: Very creepy, reminds me of Minority Report and also Batman Forever, if that’s what you were referring to. Frankly I’d rather take my chances in Iraq than ever live in a Philip K. Dick nightmare….
@FitJulie: My thoughts exactly. This is as 1984 as i hope the world will ever get.
“Ahem. And the winner of the worst company in america… errm, excuse me… the whole F#%&@*% world is (drumroll please)…
COMCAST!!!”
@Buran: Haha, I love that quote. It is indeed like the Force.
I can’t believe nobody mentioned this yet!
It was just months ago were Comcast talked about the possibility of having new movie releases available at the same time as theaters via on-demand. There was talk in these very comments (or gizmodo, can’t remember) about people saving money by having a bunch of friends over for ‘movie night’ at their place, since more people are enjoying home theaters rather then going to the ‘mega-plex’. So how could Comcast and the studios prevent this?
Cameras!
Granted, most of us here would find a way to circumvent this, but the public in general are idiots and will accept whatever Crapcast installs in their house. This all makes sense now. Want to order the fight or the next WWE event? You’ll get charged by the amount of people you have over your house watching!
I’m loving my FiOS service more and more everyday.
i call total bullshit, who the hell is this blogger?
Kunkel would make a good Democrat candidate for President…
ugg
that is such a horrible idea
No more sex in front of late night tv:(
Hell to the no there’s not gonna be a camera in my house. I would cancel my cable and buy more DVDs.
I am so happy that I canceled my Comcast subscription months ago. Don’t like it folks? Then stop giving these fools your money. Once you take the plunge and cancel your cable, you won’t regret it. In fact, you’ll kick yourself for not doing it earlier.
I hope their facial recognition cameras and their like gesture-based navigation will be able to recognize the middle fingers and the asses of everybody in my living room when we moon the idiots at Comcast for even thinking of such a fucked up concept.
In the words of Will Smith,
“Aww HELL naw!”
Eeew…that’s soooo creepy!! What’s next? ElectroChips in the back of our necks that are programmed with our favorite TV shows?!?! That’s just not right…
Silly peeps, this is to help you…….
ve vant to make sure you do not let children watch the wrong things…ve vant to make sure you behave…ve vant only vhat is good for us, ahem; you…
just keep watching mind numbing tv…no worries,
you just Consume & Conform, ve Control
who knows , ve might have it in there already, hahahahahahahahaha
Although this is really really unsettling, keeping a roll of painters tape around would really kind of nullify the camera and not mar the device at the same time (so they couldn’t charge you for ‘damaging’ it). The only thing that would really get me up in arms is if they decided to make it mandatory for service.
Either way, this guy is a total nutbar if he thinks that’s gonna work.
over my dead body!
366th use for duct tape . . .
I can’t wait for the NSA to tap into this technology.
Big Brother will really be watching you!
@brandymb: No, he’s make a great Republitard.
@JenniMoyer: I don’t know about the rest of the folks around here, but there’s really only one gesture I’m interested in giving to Comcast. Can you guess which single finger on my right hand is involved in that?
I’ve unfortunately had to suffer through a Comcast takeover of an Adelphia cable system where I live. Years later we still don’t have digital phone service, still have worthless cable boxes, still have lousy customer service (it’s actually gotten worse since all we can do now is call the 1-800 number), still are paying too much, and now have terrible looking HD feeds to top it all off.
I can hardly wait until Verizon runs FiOS out to me. There’s a reason we all feel that Comcast’s services are just comcrapstic!