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.
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Perhaps I’ve seen Enemy of the State too many times,
or perhaps I’m just naive about the depths to which
Comcast currently tracks my every move. I can’t trust
Comcast with BitTorrent, so why should I trust them with
my must-be-kept-secret, DVR-clogging addiction to Keeping
Up with the Kardashians?
Kunkel also spoke on camera with me about fixing bad Comcast
user experiences, the ongoing BitTorrent battle and VOD.
But he mostly towed the corporate line on these issues (the
monitoring your living room came up after my camera was
put away).