As suggested in the Brockmann & Company report, Hardware-as-a-Service, the role of the appliance is expanding to include gatherer of [[metadata]] for processing by a coordinated central service.
This is exactly what the folks at Tivo are doing and offering for sale to networks such as GE's NBC unit. The Tivo, in order to perform it's DVR/Receiver function is intimately aware of the users' television recording and viewing habits. It is able to gather that metadata and aggregate it with demographic information about where the customer lives and other information that the customer has to on purpose provide, or optionally provide in order to get other value from Tivo. Value like warranty or coupons for pay-per-view or whatever.
NBC, in a Wall Street Journal article {subscription required} on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 announced the formation of an alliance to share Tivo-gathered data with advertisers. This is about making TV advertising more effective, and brings TV advertising one step closer to the instant relevance capabilities of search engine advertising.
