Turning off the computer and the cell phone and sitting down for a night (or at least couple hours) of mind-numbing television won't remove you from the real world much longer. Advanced televisions, set-top boxes and digital video recorders (DVRs) like the new TiVo Premiere can now discern what you want to watch and, more importantly for advertisers and marketers, what you like to watch when you sit down in your easy chair.
Intel is spearheading the end of traditional TV snooze-outs with what it calls a "Personalized TV" set up that connects all your devices--TV, cell phone and computer--so that they can all know what you're up to at any time in the given day and communicate that information with each other. Fortunately, for those who really don't want to offer up that much information or who occasionally want to break away from Big Brother, Intel won't have something really settled in the space until 2012.
In the meantime, TiVo, which is marketing itself as the "Google of television," can help decide what you should watch and then let you do so live, record it or stream it to another device. For those who just can't get enough television, SnapStream is planning to show off what it calls "the world's largest DVR" that can record 50 channels at once and put them into a storage system that is "equivalent to 326 TiVo Premiere boxes" at NAB next week.
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