Now here’s an interesting news item:

my Stuff and News [mySaN.de] - Justin and Janet Steal Super Bowl Show, According to TiVo

The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo’s unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again. Overall, the halftime extravaganza had a powerful grip on viewers. According to TiVo’s analysis of aggregated data from an anonymous sample of 20,000 households, viewership of the game’s intermission increased by 12 percent compared to last year’s halftime show.

What’s interesting about this isn’t so much that people made use of their TiVo’s to watch Janet’s tit get exposed over and over again, but that the folks at TiVo know they did it.

I want a PVR, but I have a hard time forking out the sort of cash that a TiVo or ReplayTV cost plus a monthly fee just for the stupid programming guide and in doing so allow the folks at TiVo to spy on my viewing habits. It’s pretty bad when they can pick up on the fact that thousands of folks rewound and watched the few seconds of Janet’s boobie bouncing around the screen over and over again. Much the same way I don’t want Ashcroft peering over my shoulder at what books I pick up from the library, I also don’t want the folks at TiVo analyzing my viewing habits. It’s only a matter of time before this sort of data collection ends up being used against someone.