You know what they say, TiVo killed television. And if they don't say that... well, they do now. One of the distinctions made a lot these days when people quote ratings statistics is that they attempt to ascertain the number of people watching live. I can't personally fathom how they manage to separate those who watch live, and those who record it. Logically, and this is all based on my fairly limited understanding of the technology, but, is the TV tuner on the inside of a TiVo or one of Formac's EyeTV devices so different from one inside a TV? How could they know who watches live? Does the recorder somehow transmit information about itself like:"I AM A RECORDER - SEND ME SIGNAL NOW." Because that would make little sense. At the very heart of the problem is the fact that cable companies can't selectively deny digital recorders the signal they record. If they could they would, lets face it, but then how do they claim to know anyway? Surveys?

The only point I have to make is that recently SciFi seems to have been attempting something that could act as a measure of this: "And only viewers that watch LIVE can unlock secret bonus features on SciFi.com"

They've been trying that for a while now, and I even tried it once... it was kinda lame.

But it just hit me tonight, and I know this would be ludicrous but, could they be trying to use their bandwidth usage on those video files to try and track how many people watch live?

Now maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, (seems more than likely) but, though it would seem so clear that that's the only good reason to encourage viewers to go on the internet, that just can't be what they're attempting... can it?

Night all,

~FatAlbert