Confessions of a TiVo Addict

Opinion: Page (1) of 1 - 12/09/04

Confessions of a TiVo Addict Has TiVo really ruined my life? By Stephen Schleicher

Hi. My name is Stephen, and I?m a TiVo addict. I love TiVo so much that I actually bought two; one for the home theatre in the rec room and dual tuner for the family set. While TiVo (and PVRs in general) is the best thing since sliced bread, there are some reasons for concern.

The great thing about TiVo is I no longer have to worry about missing my favorite television shows. Tell TiVo to record Smallville, and boom, every episode of Smallville is recorded and stored until I have a chance to watch it. Love The Rockford Files? No problem set a Season Pass to record every episode. Heck, if you put Rockford on a Wish list, if The Rockford Files movies air on a different channel, TiVo will catch them too. Don?t want to watch a repeat? The Season Pass Manager let?s you select which episodes TiVo will record. If I am watching a live show, and the cat throws up on the carpet, I can push the pause button, clean up the mess, and when the cat is feeling better, resume watching CSI, or CSI: Miami, or CSI: New York, without missing a beat.

Life is great with TiVo. Or is it?

The bad thing about TiVo is it gets to know you. Maybe a little too well. It looks at what you view and then makes recommendations on other shows you may like. Thus, when I get home tonight, TiVo will not only have recorded South Park, The Rockford Files, CSI, Smallville, and Oprah (for my wife of course), it will have also found about 10 other shows that fit into similar categories that I might also be interested in. And you know what? I usually am. Now along with Good Eats, TiVo also records Food Finds, 30 Minute Meals, and $40 a Day. Instead of speeding through five programs in two hours or less, I now find myself interested in more and more television programs that I would not have otherwise known existed.

Where is all of the free time I am supposed to have? Instead of giving you more free time, TiVo has sucked you in and your new free time is spent watching all of the new programs.

Then there is the green thumb. Have you seen these pop up in the middle of a television commercial? The green Thumb?s Up is probably one of the best marketing tools out there. The Thumb?s Up shows up during commercials for some television shows. If you press the Thumb?s Up when a show promo is on, it will record that episode for you, meaning you now have more programs to watch.

I first encountered the Thumb?s Up when watching a GMC commercial. Instead of watching a single 30 second commercial for a truck, you press the green thumb, and TiVo will take you to a downloaded extended coverage commercial stored on the box?s hard drive. When you are done watching the extended sales pitch, requesting further information, and entering the contest for a free vehicle, you can return to your show without missing the third act cliff hanger. For those unable to resist the green thumb urge, TiVo will have you wrapped around its finger. For advertisers, TiVo is a great marketing tool.

How do these extended commercials and promotions end up on the TiVo unit? It downloads them in the middle of the night when it places a call to find the new program listing. And this is the really scary thing about TiVo. It is sending all of your viewing data, including what was rewound and watched in slow motion to the company. How do we know this? How else would TiVo be able to claim that the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction was the most watched/reviewed clip of the Super Bowl?

The TiVo website does have a privacy statement in their FAQ,

?The TiVo box collects certain types of information from its users, including Anonymous Viewing Information, Diagnostic Information, Commerce Information, and Service Information. TiVo has no way to access any of your Personally Identifiable Viewing Information from your box without your prior consent. Absent your consent, the TiVo service has no way of knowing what shows you-as an individual or household- have watched, recorded, or rated with Thumbs UpTM or Thumbs DownTM.

TiVo does collect Anonymous Viewing Information; that is, information about viewing choices made while using your box, but that does not identify you as an individual or household. In other words, there is no personally identifiable information associated with the viewing information that could identify the viewing information as coming from you or your household. TiVo also collects Diagnostic Information from a small number of randomly sampled boxes for quality control purposes.?

There are some definite good points about Anonymous Viewing Information. This data could be sold to networks and cable programmers to find out what portions of a particular show scored higher, or what types of programming they should create in the future. Since there are a huge number of TiVo units currently in use, the data could even be used to more accurately rate television programming where the Nielsen ratings fail.

There is also a dark side to Anonymous Viewing Information.

Let?s suppose there is a group of people who have some very radical views as to what should or should not be viewed by the people of the community and want to show that a large portion of the viewing public is watching ?prurient? programs.* The Anonymous Viewing information collected by TiVo is not truly anonymous. Instead, the data can be sorted by zip code to show what users in specific regions are watching. It only took Professor Harold Hill a few minutes to get an entire town wound up about a pool table; the same could be done by fundamentalist groups pushing an agenda.

Of course the great thing about the Anonymous Viewing information being sorted by zip code is it can actually help define what the average viewer in a community is watching, thus helping to define community standards.

Now I have the paranoia of who is using TiVo viewing data to push their agenda to contend with.

I placed a phone call to TiVo to see if they are selling any of this information to advertisers, activists groups, networks, or governmental agencies, but have not received a reply as of this writing.

And what happens after you have watched all of your Season Pass programs, recommended programs, and Wish List shows? I have found myself going into TiVo withdrawal. I find it almost excruciating to watch live television now. I want to be able to fast forward through commercials. I want to see what other shows are out there that TiVo thinks I might enjoy. I want to find new programs to record and cheats and hacks that will allow me to zap commercials all together, and to Frankenstein my system so it will record a massive 200 hours of quality programming.

TiVo is certainly a great product that has certainly found its place in the home entertainment market. The joy of being able to zip through commercials and get back to the program I want to watch makes life enjoyable again. Not having to program a VCR for every show ? or for that matter, changing tapes is a blessing. However, once you are addicted to the sweet sweet candy that is TiVo, you?re a goner. Life will never be the same, and with the scary amount of data TiVo collects on viewing, it could radically change how we watch and use TiVo in the future.

*Michael Powell released information showing that the number of complaints on programming has risen to more than 240,000 last year compared to the 14,000 the year before and less than 350 for the previous two years before that. According to a FCC estimate, nearly 99.8 percent of the complaints received in 2003 were from the Parents Television Council.

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