Big Brother reality
The first demo shown by Rattner involved a rather primitive looking data mining concept, tracking individual football players and ball movement during a game. Now, not only has the technology to data mine been around for about three years, but the whole thing seemed rather over the top and unnecessary. If one wanted to watch the highlights of a game, surely one would just watch Sky sports or Match of the day rather than fiddle about tracking individual players and goals, surely?
What struck us HEXUS hacks the most was the fact Rattner seemed to be advocating putting masses of compute power into set top boxes in the living room - a theoretical concept still three to four years out. But, why bother with beefing up compute power in TVs, we asked ourselves, when most of the industry is abuzz with visions of the cloud and streaming content directly to thin clients? Does it make sense to harvest so much hardware in the TV room, when it could just as happily float around ready to be streamed on demand? We think not.
Another worrying aspect of the whole spiel was he revenue model, based heavily on targeted advertising. The new and improved, smarter Intel TVs, according to Rattner, would also be able to interact with MIDs, in order to assess the viewer's mood, ad and even content preferences based on browsing and messaging habits.
For example, if a person has been researching guitars online, the TV would be able to pick up on this and beam the user adverts based on buying guitars or guitar accessories. Fair enough, but who wants their porn browsing habits broadcasted to the family living room TV? We asked ourselves.
We even found ourselves agreeing with Mooly Eden's mantra of "you wouldn't share a toothbrush, so why share a mobile device?" In all seriousness, Having a device send you ads based on where you are, what you have watched, or other information is in great danger of falling prey to wildly overzealous marketing people, which would make things very complicated and unpleasant if the government suddenly decided to step in and regulate it all.
