After noting yesterday the Turner CEO who described PVR users as thieves, there comes more news that a judge has ordered SonicBlue (the number two PVR service) to monitor and track their customers' viewing habits. It's been well known that TiVo does this at an aggregate statistical level. Many of my friends bought SonicBlue's ReplayTV boxes for their stricter privacy policy. Now the major media outlets have used the court system to force monitoring on SonicBlue so that they can "prove" that the viewers are skipping over commercials and thus, depriving them of revenue.
The plaintiffs asked SonicBlue to turn over information on how individuals use the recording devices. SonicBlue said it does not track that information. The magistrate, who is supervising discovery, ordered the company to write software in the next 60 days that would record every ``click'' from every customer's remote control.Amazing! Ordered to write software to record every click from their customers' remote controls.