Google's game here is obvious: by analyzing this anonymized sea of TiVo viewer data, they can help customers target their ads more accurately. Ad buyers also win, because they have a better sense of exactly how many people are actually seeing their ads. Guess who doesn't like this plan!:

Now, with TiVo's data, collected from millions of digital video recorders across the country, Google can tell exactly which of those commercials are being bypassed. If all the commercials are being skipped, the channel gets no money. It's easy to see why TV executives get heartburn over this.

Between my cable box's DVR function and my computer, I rarely watch live TV. And when I do, I usually end up flipping around during commercials. I know I'm not alone, and I know this is causing problems for networks, who are pushing more and more of their advertising into show, instead of between them.

Google, which already licenses similar data from Dish Network, is giving us a preview of how this kind of thing will work for everyone in the future—soon, data detailing what people are and aren't watching will be too present, too obvious to ignore, and networks will have to acknowledge that hey, nobody is watching ads anymore. In the long term this will make advertising more effective and efficient, but it could also kneecap TV ad sales as a whole. Or not! Says Google:

Our system makes it easy for people to buy TV ads. We're lowering the barriers to entry, which has the effect of growing the market.

Somehow I imagine "lowering the barriers for entry" isn't on the top of NBC's to-do list right now. Google will kill all. [LAT]

According to the patent, the main point of the system is to identify audio within a TV broadcast and compare it to the appropriate reference material for identification. After that, it aggregates "personalized information related to the media broadcast."

What sort of personalized info? On one hand, Google wants to layer in complementary websites and other data—I hope this means the IMDB tab I've been waiting for, but it also refers to the old "buy what the hot actress on Letterman is wearing" function. On the other hand, Google is really trying to turn your TV watching into a social experience that would be a lot smoother than logging into a computer. The goal is to share a viewing and chatting experience simultaneously, but this doesn't seem to account for the fact that DVRs have made realtime TV watching an antiquated concept.

More importantly to us, but way down in the filing, another form of analysis besides audio evaluation is discussed, that of using a still or video camera for "pattern matching":

Various known pattern-matching algorithms can be applied to an image or a sequence of images to determine the number of viewers present in a broadcast environment during a particular broadcast. The images and or data derived from the images can be used in combination with audio descriptors to gather personalized information for a user, compute popularity ratings, or for any other purpose.

Now, normally we wouldn't give them any extra attention, but after their first video got so many people riled up they decided to make a follow-up. In the above video, "Mark. E. Erickson" gives a demo of the "GoogleTV Beta" in a single shot, trying to prove that logging in and out of Gmail 700 times will actually gain you access.

It's obviously still fake, but what's impressive is how cool the mockup they made just for this prank is. It looks like they made a fake GoogleTV just to run for these videos, and it looks surprisingly like something Google would create. I'd personally rather have a video of them showing what they did to perpetrate this hoax rather than another one trying to convince us that it's real, but that might be wishful thinking. In any case, let's just think of it as a cool product concept created by prankster jackasses rather than Photoshop wizards. Yeah, that'll make you feel better about wasting four hours of your life logging in and out of your email account. –Adam Frucci

We here at the Giz are very skeptical but have been trying despite our better judgment to no avail. There are plenty of reasons to think this is BS, including the insanely cheesy intro to this video (oh, that music!), but just the idea of being able to play around with GoogleTV gets our tents popped all over the place.

Anyone with more patience than us want to see if they can prove/disprove this? And someone find out who this Mark Erickson character is, will ya? Internet detectives, do your thing. –Adam Frucci