Man, all of you Microsoft haters come off as so damn ignorant. This technology is an extension of the Nielsen ratings. The point is just to get an idea of who is watching what so that advertisers can spend their money more wisely.

I don't like having my personal info given to advertisers as much as the next person but this technology isn't going to broadcast what you're doing in your house back out to tv networks or advertisers, or even Microsoft. Believe me, no one wants to watch you watching TV.

"In L.A." calls Microsoft an "EVIL, DIABOLICAL" company. Get real. Google and Microsoft aren't very different. By the way this "EVIL" company has been working on a variety of ways to bring the world of computers in to the hands of the disabled or handicapped for the past decade.

The camera will be more like a finger print reader, to identify who is watching the show. To quote from Arstechnica,

"It would be able to detect the presence of a person and possibly even identify him or her, according to Microsoft's patent. This could be done by comparing facial characteristics against an image stored locally, or merely by comparing certain data (long, dark hair, for example) with data already stored about that user. "
- http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070731-microsoft-patent-envisions-individually-targeted-tv-commercials.html

So it's not going to send video of you back to the advertisers, it's not even going to send an image of the advertiser to you. Instead using that camera recognition the device would be able to determine who is watching, and assuming your info has been fed into the machine it'll be able to match the person sitting in the room to a bunch of statistics (age, sex) and personality traits (what do you like, what do you hate) and that will allow the right advertisers to reach the right audience.

And it's not even final yet that the camera is going to be in the final product because this is a patent application.

Even if it is installed I imagine there'd be a way to turn it off. The only consequence would be you can't get personalized advertising. This would be similar to someone who is paranoid about letting Amazon gather info and recommend items so he/she turns off cookies.

Still if something *like* this did come out it'd be great for when I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon because those commercial breaks might actually interest me.

Aren't we already being watched through our cable boxes by various agencies? When are people going to realize that Microsoft is an EVIL, DIABOLICAL company and they have been for decades. You cannot become the richest person in the world (2nd richest now) without lying, cheating, and stealing from others. I hope GOOGLE squashes Microsoft once and for all...

But at least when the blipverts cause us to explode, Bryce will be able to record it so Edison Carter can report it.

C'mon, anyone?

Guess what this is all coming from the Trusted Platform Module research/development.

The idea behind it was to have a user who is using a software together with "his" serial number acknowledge his physical presence in front of the computer and then have the machine go on the internet and log in to a server so that you could always associate a user with a serial number to a license so that nobody else could use that serial to use the software during a user being logged in.

So all they have to do is connect a camera to their already developed TPM-chips (which were supposed to be on all motherboards of all PCs by now but they didn't quite get that done because so many people were against it - though former IBM now Lenovo notebooks as well as FujitsuSiemens and HP Laptops tend to have the TPM on board anyway).

The more PC technology is integrated into TVs the easier it will get to just activate the then activate the already integrated TPMs chips.

You know the age of big brother is coming. It's just a matter of time. The big corporations are already getting the hardware they need in place to sooner or later activate it, all in the name of copyright, or in other cases, toll checking (like for trucks on the german autobahn which is currently checking for ALL license plates not just the ones of trucks - and in the end one day that data will be seamlessly integrated into the police surveillance networks). CCTV cameras are already plastered all over the UK in the name of security and to prevent loitering and littering.

I guess it will take another twenty to thirty years to get a rating system in place that will check if a person is actually watching - and how many people are at a given time.

Another ten years and they will be checking where we look on screen to refine advertising.

Eh, if they go through with this, buy some electrical tape and start covering up the cameras.

MS may be out of touch with what consumers want, but they are right in step with what the advertiser and networks want. Who's opinion do you think they care more about?

>>Microsoft is seriously out of touch with what consumers want.

The day that becomes standard equipment is the day I give up television all together. Forget watching it on DVD. If the entertainment industry goes along with technology like this, I'll boycott all visual media. At least they can't pull off this technology with radio.

Hell no. No effing way I would allow Microsoft to fix a camera on me and report back what I'm doing on a daily basis. If this were April 1st, I would be convinced this was an April fools joke. Microsoft is seriously out of touch with what consumers want.

They already have this technology in Soviet Russia.