Okay, This Freaks Me Out
I will admit this: I like my TIVO and being able to watch my teevee shows when I want to watch them.
But, Thelma and I have an agreement. Whichever of us dies first, the other one will go immediately to our house and erase our TIVO and clear our email. I do not want to leave behind a hundred HGTV shows I never got around to watching nor do I want people to know that I record them religiously. I also don’t want to “out” many local Republicans who snitch to me about the good gossip. (Note to local Republicans – if you aren’t snitching to me about another local Republican, you can bet your boopie that someone is snitching to me about you.)
Anydamnway, I read this and got all freaked out this morning.
Dish Network and DirecTV on Monday announced a plan to jointly give political advertisers the ability to microtarget their ads down to the household level. That means that any of over 20 million homes in the United States will soon start getting highly personalized campaign spots that were meant just for them.
Here’s how it works: While your set-top box is idle, it’ll tune into a channel that’s playing the ad you’re meant to see. It’ll record the ad using DVR, then insert it into your regular programming while you’re watching a show — replacing or bumping the ad that was supposed to air instead. This can be replicated for any household that subscribes to Dish or DirecTV, so a political strategist can pick you out and feed you a unique message.
I do not want a box in my house that does secret stuff when I’m not looking. Well, unless my oven wants to whip up a soufflé while I’m napping. That would be okay.
What if it screws up and records Sean Hannity and that very day I get hit by a truck and my beloved ones see that on my teevee and think I’m a closet wing nut? Hell, they probably wouldn’t even come to my funeral.
Look, the only reason I have that tivo thing is to skip over the commercials. Don’t mess with me, I’m hell on the fast forward button.
I am with you 100% on this one. THAT is the creepy news of the day Juanita. For now I am not effected because I don’t own a TeeVee but the ways things are going technologywise we will probably have microtargeted commercials being beamed in to our heads in a few years. Keeping my tin foil hat on at night, too.
1I have DISH but I declined the Joey thing … ain’t a doggone thing on the TV that I think I need to record. If I can’t sit and watch it at the time, then I don’t need to see it at all … or I can go to http://www.hulu.com and see if I can watch something on that. Much better! I don’t want any of those Faux Snooze folks showing up as ads on my TV.
2Juanita Jean, if you were a closet wing nut who admired Sean Hannity then I would happily come to your funeral.
Of course, I would prefer to go to Sean Hannity’s funeral. Assuming they could find a box big enough to hold his ego.
3Wow, so us poor folks who haven’t watched tv in years are really going to be missing out. Doggone, I’m so disappointed.
4@LynnN: give him an enema bury him in a match box.
In that same vein Mark Twain foresaw Hannity and his ilk, “I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
5Talk about Big Brother! First the NSA, then Tivo. Not sure the tin foil hat can do it. Better invest in kryptonite and a flux capacitor. One to block those messages and the other to escape to the past or future.
6Marcia in CO, I’m not home at the time my favorite shows are on, belonging to a couple of choirs and other not-for-profit stuff. I use my DVR to catch up on weekends. The other reason for recording everything is to do as Miz Juanita does and fast forward through all the commercials.
Do Dish Network and DirecTV have a privacy opt-out for this program? If they don’t, sic the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on them [http://epic.org/]. They do great work.
7I’m going to start turning the channel to 1 – which is a non-stop presentation of features of Direct TV’s remote. I am also going to call them even though this seems to be a fairly stupid idea – one of the reasons I record shows is to zap through the commercials – and advertisers/political consultants should know that. On second thought if the Koch brothers want to spend billions on ads I’m never going to see – it is their money after they ripped it from the hands of women and children and stuffed it in their pockets.
8The main benefit of our small, locally owned and operated cable tv system is that they will provide service to us where the big names like Comcast fear to tread. While the selection is limited to a mere 50 channels, there is something quaintly charming about getting a phone call from the service technician asking if we have service because he’s trying to locate a break in the line somewhere and we’re one of the first customers on this side of the creek so if we have service the break is somewhere further down the line. We can’t use TIVO type devices because they need to know what’s on which channel and when so that you can set up the record function only since they don’t know the name of our supplier, they can’t figure any of that out. The only real downside to that is we have to pay attention to know when a new episode of Sherlock is about to be broadcast — that 2 year hiatus while Watson was off playing Bilbo was nearly intolerable.
9I live in Pennsylhio and am starting to look on the Amish with envy.
10Why aren’t we asking why the advertising fees they are collecting for this “service” are not being deducted from our bills? I am fairly certain they are not providing the weasels with oddly specific access as a public service or just because they like them.
1130 years ago I worked for a company that did something like this, test marketing ads in conjunction with a supermarket rewards program. We would replace ads on the local cable feed for select groups to test their response at the store. Now they can do it without any human help.
12And that’s why God invented the OFF switch.
13Another reason to ditch cable; glad we already did.
But the article says that this direct-ad attack will be expensive and few campaigns can afford it. So guess which can? The ones funded by Kochs.
14@SusanF … seeing as how I’m retired, I can pretty much catch what I want to see on TV … not that much to see anyway. I have some of the sitcoms I watch at night but during the day, I’m usually on the computer checking out Facebook. During the day, I usually have MSNBC on and will listen while I’m on the computer rather then sitting in the living room watching!
15How much do I get to deduct from my bill for this stuff?
16This is going to go over real well. Wait until the Budweiser company finds out their jillion dollar Super Bowl ad has been replaced in the Bankston house by Ed’s Super Snail Killer.
17It is called Directed Channel Change and has been part of the Advanced Television Spec since the early 2000s.
It works on over the air broadcast as well, where they don’t control the DVR, they just change the channel you are watching.
A form of it has been working since the 1980s, as while you might want to advertise snow tires nationwide today, normally you don’t want those commercials in the south.
Retired Network Transmission Engineer
18I don’t have cable or satellite; it’s way too expensive. We’re a broadcast home, complete with rabbit ears like the olden days. We tape everything (on a VCR!) to watch later, so we can skip the commercials.
But. as far as being tracked, because I come to the WMDBS to get my long brunette locks tended to, while I’m surfing the net, I get ads about Texas and its politicians. Pretty funny.
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