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ArnoldRimmer on 15 July 2013
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endimion said:
the head count theory is a broken one.... I could easily turn the Kinect sensor toward a single person in my living room rendering the idea useless...

Well, I agree that this patent alone cannot completely prevent customers from trying to trick the system. But obviously the Kinect developers did not consider the idea completely useless, otherwise they wouldn't have filed the patent. In practice, many people might think it's not worth the effort to try to trick the system, especially if the additional fee per additional person is rather low. Who wants to be the lonely Kinect fooler who has to stand in the corner of the room?

But anyway, I don't expect that we will see this particular concept at Xbone launch anyway. It was just an example of a possible reason why Kinect must be connected that is rather in Microsoft's interest than the customer's, an idea that we know the Kinect/Xbox developers definitely considered.

endimion said:
you have very little information through just the eye of Kinect beside physical features and head count, nothing on the household income, taste, type of housing etc....

That would be Microsoft's smallest problem. Give anyone who agrees to provide the necessary information two months of Xbox Live Gold, and a lot of people would already agree. Give them constantly free XBL, and most people probably would.

endimion said:

and once again why would it be bad ???? after all those studies are made to provide products and content that appeal always more to the customers.... I don't see how that would be bad to have better quality programing on TV based on what people are apparently enjoying the most.... ??? 

That's a good question indeed: Why are you looking for something that can only be considered bad?

endimion said:

but in any case if they wanted to do that they would have to expressively let you know that they are collecting data for marketing purposes....

I'm not even sure they'd necessarily have to (considering that many recent internet-connected Smart TVs are already doing something very similar, without asking for the owner's permission), but I agree that Microsoft probably wouldn't just silently implement such a feature without notifying the user.