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FEATURE: The bold new frontier of TV user profiles received a boost this week with news that Toshiba has implemented face recognition technology in its range of Regza televisions, using built-in cameras to identify different users and automatically switch to their preferred settings, but there may be life in the humble remote control yet (writes Jamie Beach, editor of IPTV News).

Toshiba's new Regza YL and WL models are powered by the Cevo multi-core processing platform, and offer a number of clever features including active 3D, 2D-to-3D conversion, and new 3D Resolution+ and NetResolution+ imaging technologies, in addition to built-in WiFi, DLNA and Windows 7 compatibility and the online portal Toshiba Places.

What will excite pay-TV operators and their advertisers more however is a potential solution to the tricky question of how different users can easily log in to their own profile on an advanced pay-TV service: some technology providers, such as Ericsson, currently espouse the use of a smartphone or tablet computer as a TV remote, working on the assumption that if each member of the household downloads the remote control app to their device, it will act as a highly personalised login peripheral.

Others such as Austrian firm ruwido, a provider of high-end remote controls, favour the fingerprint-scanning approach (link here) - a James Bond-esque solution with obvious security benefits, as parents can confidently limit their child's access to potentially harmful content such as adult channels, but one which places the economic burden on the operator, as these units are naturally more expensive than their plain-Jane counterparts.

The new Cevo-based Toshiba Regza televisions, which will be available from mid-June, offer a variety of clever features, including the ability to switch to standby if its camera detects that no-one is watching. Camera-based user recognition technology (similar to that already available in the Xbox Kinect) also all sorts of potential benefits for advertisers: they can gauge with increasing clarity many physical characteristics of each user, such as height, approximate weight etc. There is no word yet though on whether Toshiba is planning to add gesture-based navigation to its new tellies (as is already possible on the Xbox 360 using the Kinect add-on).

Camera-based user recognition is however likely to require a lot of development and long periods of testing before it can be meaningfully applied by pay-TV operators (who demand polished solutions from the get-go), as well as further outlays by consumers who are already being asked to pay significant sums for 3D and Connected TV capabilities on their new sets.

Meanwhile, the use of remote control apps on existing mobile devices to log in to user profiles and navigate a TV service involves lower expenditures by viewers (as many already possess smartphones), uses technology that is already functioning in the real-world, and can tell advertisers much, much more about each user than just their physical characteristics and what they do on the TV.

Despite the march of technology, TV remains a lean-back experience, while consumers' smartphones are capable of gleaning much more information about their owner than a television set or service: the smartphone-as-login-device seems to make the most sense at present, both for consumers and for operators, and smartphone UIs have the added benefit of being extremely familiar to the user.

With all that said however, the opening conference keynotes of last month's IP&TV World Forum (link here) delivered a sobering reminder of the gap between all of this exciting technology and its current relevance: whilst Dr. Giles Wilson, CTO Solution Area TV at Ericsson, enthused on the role smart mobile devices can play in advanced television services for text input and social media functions (leaving the TV free to deliver video content), the attending representative from UK cableco Virgin Media (Ian Mecklenburgh, Director of Consumer Platforms) stated in his own presentation that most Virgin Media TV customers are not early adopters, and are not at present clamouring for the integration of services such as Facebook and Twitter.

If the rumours that Microsoft is preparing to deliver linear television services to the Xbox console ever come true then its launch of the Kinect add-on could prove a masterstroke, as it would enable the television service to recognise users thanks to an already-installed base of Kinect devices, as well as provide the existing benefit of bringing the Xbox 360's gaming capabilities to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, the launch of Virgin's exciting new IP-powered TiVo service (link here) - which promises to smoothly blend linear TV and PVR features with a content recommendation engine, on-demand offerings and other interactive services, including social networks and video sharing sites - is for many consumers a bright-enough harbinger of things to come in the world of advanced pay-TV.

Given the increasingly personalised nature of pay-TV services in many developed markets, and the multiple benefits of more targeted advertising, the question of how to elegantly and surely identify a TV viewer is unlikely to go away: yet rather than face recognition, it may well be the smartphone-as-remote that eventually sits regnant.

What do you think? How do you expect the TV services of the future to identify different users? Is the remote control dead? Post your thoughts below!

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