Microsoft Integrating Xbox One Advertising With Kinect To Profile Users For Ads 300
MojoKid writes "When Microsoft reversed its Xbox One DRM policies a few weeks back, there was momentary hope that the company has listened to its customers and understood the features they were asking for. Granted, this was brief. However, with Mattrick gone, there was some hope that maybe the company would reintroduce plans like Family Sharing and put the console back on track. Apparently not. Microsoft's big new feature with Kinect? Advertising. Microsoft plans to use Kinect to make advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as it's playing to change the final outcome. The other way Microsoft wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft will likely learn that telling gamers that the Xbox One is an ad-centric experience and attempting to spin it like a positive doesn't actually work."
Mark Penn (Score:5, Interesting)
Meet Mark Penn http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=1& [nytimes.com] This *cough* shitslinger of joys like scroogled is also in charge of include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.
Mr. Penn was put in charge of innocently titled “strategic and special projects” its nice that his work bulldozing enemies of the Clintons is now but to work slinging shit at Google.
Ironically this is another article about Bing being shoved down peoples throats in another Duopoly rather than competing on old fashioned things like competition. Perhaps Microsoft Time and Money would be spent serving its hostages.
You can't buy hardware from Apple/Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Why are there even ads on the Xbox? After all you've:
A) Bought the console
B) Bought some games (presumably)
C) Quite possibly bought a gold membership
Now, I can understand something like when you go to the store to have maybe a little promo of "what's new" but beyond that, ads are unacceptable.
Except you don't buy anything anymore you don't own your xbox...games...service you license them. Suck it up or by an alternative product of which there is many. I have bought an OuYa.
Re:It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh! I just got it (Score:4, Interesting)
Looking at a still photo of the XBox One screen just made me realize... it finally dawned on me where Microsoft got the idea for the start screen tiles on XBox and Windows 8.
It's the Wii. All they've done is let you have some of the boxes be bigger than the others - but it's basically the Wii's interface that Nintendo released in 2006.
Even the ads. The Wii used the boxes for the Shop to advertise stuff you could buy.
Re:It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Wikipedia article regarding Steam (my emphasis):
"Steam collects and reports anonymous metrics of its usage, stability, and performance.[53] With the exception of Valve's hardware survey,[54] most collection occurs without notifying the user or offering an opt-out. Some of these metrics are available publicly, such as what games are being played or statistics on player progress in certain games.[55] Valve has also used information from these statistics to justify implementing new features in Steam, such as the addition of a defragmentation option for game caches.[56] Valve announced on July 15, 2010 that in conjunction with collecting hardware information in Steam's opt-in hardware surveys, they would begin collecting a list of the user's installed software as well.[57]"
I don't bad-mouth Steam/Valve--I simply don't do business with them. Never have, never will. I suspect I am not alone in that regard.
Feedback Loop (Score:5, Interesting)
They play adverts, they monitor the kinect camera, and they can see which ads have an effect and are watched. XBox is an ads mans wet dream. Never mind that its a customers nightmare.
Also the possibilities for profit are endless:
Suppose you are in the UK and have an XBox with Kinect. NSA can legally spy on Brits, so it buys spy time on XBox Kinects to watch a target. Turns on the camera, gets its surveillance data and hey presto, leverage. Maybe a politicians family is in, the son is smoking pot, that's paydirt and you as customer brought the surveillance camera into your own home and wired it up yourself and even pay for the connection to the NSA!
Would Microsoft sell them access? Well it provided live Skype taps, message+voice+video taps on Skype. And Skype must have some business model we can't see to justify its $7 billion price. So yeh, damn right!