Your TiVo swings both ways
Your TiVo swings both ways
Rick Ellis, of AllYourSoaps, points to a Wall Street Journal story that suggests TiVo PVRs can jump to conclusions about sexual orientation or ethnic background. Key quotes:
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
It's worth the read, for sure, but only if you have a subscription to the WSJ - sorry. Anyway, Rick goes on to make some great points about personalization:
Sure, it's fun to talk about someone who finds their Tivo is convinced they're gay (or Korean), but the story for me is that it shows how difficult it is to personalize an experience as intimate as watching television.
And oddly enough, watching TV is an intimate experience. Why we watch something is a personal, often unpredictable decision. And the beauty of the solitary experience that is television is that it allows viewers to watch whatever they want, without any social consequences (other than an irate spouse).
The majority of viewers have a wide range of favourites, and more often that not, they're not choices that seem logical to outsiders. If someone watches "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer" because one of the actresses reminds them of an ex-girlfriend, it doesn't necessarily mean that they would also watch "Angel" or "The Dead Zone." Sure, if someone watches anything with Sean Hayes in it, a DVR can make pretty good guesses on what to deliver. But unfortunately for the Tivo's of the world, humanity isn't usually that predictable (or easy to please).
Which in a way may get back around to the AOL/Time Warner discussion we had earlier in the week. I can see the value of an AOLTV with DVR which would allow you to add programs to the "please tape this" list simply by clicking a button while you're on AOL. That option would add a lot of value to a closed AOL system, and offer sister studios some real options for easy cross-promotion. Tying in online content to a "record this" button seems like a natural progression of the medium.
Rick's right. Personalization demands breaking down barriers between devices and programming boundaries that exist arbitrarily at this point in the digital evolution simply to protect franchises, like monthly PVR programming guide services for a fee.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at November 27, 2002 10:01 AM
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