Privacy Security: Mobile Antenna Vans tracking Your TV Viewing History Electronic Surveillance 1956

Privacy Security: 1956 How Mobile Antenna Vans track Your TV Viewing History. Electronic Surveillance of citizens at home nearly 70 years ago. Explore how this was done electronically and legally for TV Networks Data Collection. How does this differ from today's technology? Original vintage film from 1956 restored to bring this historical use of mobile technology, radio tracking and data computing and reporting. The van’s antenna dish points at passing homes, and retrieves viewer data. The system called Poll-O-Meter (or Pollometer) was developed by Calbest Electronics Company of California. Data (like collection agencies such as Nielsen Media Research) was eagerly mined by giant Television studio corporations for rating statistics. Data collected was computing with the Totalizer machine. Data Collection, data mining at its early 1950's days. Original film title is “The Billion Dollar Question"by the Poll-O-Meter Corporation, Produced by Vortex, Inc.” -- Restored to nearly 4k, explore the technology used in U.S. cities. Enjoy this exploration of vintage tech. Your comments are most welcome!

2k and 4k stock footage available from PeriscopeFilm

[roachtoasties]

Very exciting. When will I be seeing Poll-O-Meter vans in my neighborhood?

[kccvh]

The Poll-O-Meter seems to have some limitations. First, the local oscillator signal to the antenna is going to be very, very weak as there is always an RF amplifier in televisions with two tuned circuits to block the path backward. Then the problem that the LO frequency will be in the FM broadcast or aviation band for some channels. And if the system works as planned, it only tells that a TV is tuned to that channel, not who and how many are watching. For that, you need the People Meter, from Nielsen Media Research.

[garthhowe]

Apparently the Poll-o-meter van doesn't stop for meals, bio-breaks, or fuel. Tough job. I believe Britain used a similar tech to find homes with tv's, who hadn't purchased a license for one.

[GYTZ]

Not exactly a scientific conclusion in real Word or, it works by detecting the local oscillator frequency for the limited number of VHF channels back then. But as a vehicle drove around, they would’ve been fading. They would’ve clocked up false positives, and some receiver types with little in the way of local oscillator radiation wouldn’t have registered at all. The technology would’ve been completely obsolete by the time transistorised receivers became commonplace as more modern sets had very low local oscillator radiation.

[tpaadwp]

Interesting that they were able to pick up the LO leakage with this setup so reliably, those early TV tuners must have radiated quite a bit of power through the mixer. In professional receivers this is prevented by shielding circuit sections, adding filters, and much better mixers. In WW2 the Kriegsmarine had a unique shortwave receiver Lo6K39a made by Lorenz for this purpose that avoided the risk of getting detected by LO leakage. Instead of the superheterodyne principle it used a simple TRF design, but with 6 tuned resonant circuits.

[lencortigiano]

Back in the 1950s, you could violate American’s 4th Amendment rights against ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ and the privacy of your home, make money doing it, and even brag about it. Today of course, it’s different. That digital cable box reports your viewing habits much more accurately. And the cable providers no doubt, have clauses in their agreement with you, which allows them to monitor what you watch, without running afoul of the law.

[pileofstuff]

once again demonstrating that the advertising industry has always relied on creepy levels of monitoring to increase their abilities at manipulating the public.

[radarmusen]

In Denmark it was used to find “freeloaders” there didn’t pay for tv or radio. I was taken by them because nobody was warning me about them when I was living at college, it’s hard to tell that you didn’t have a tv, when they can hear it through the open door. 😂

[usvalve]

Hang on a minute... 10, 000 readings per hour. Let's say American houses are at 10m intervals, so the van must travel at 100 kilometers per hour *average*, including corners, junctions etc. That is some supercharged VW camper!

[marks-the-spot]

Drop one hyphen (Pollo-Meter) and you have a device that counts how many homes are eating chicken for dinner! 😁

[RealBastard-qu]

I believe this van could pick up some signals but the accuracy would be highly questionable. It was probably a marketing stunt by a company collating TV watching data collected by other methods. By the way, the detection of TVs in the UK was done by professional engineers. Also most houses in the cities of the UK had no front lawn and the front window of the lounge was often at the edge of the footpath. The detector vehicle would often be line of sight only 2 to 5 metres from the TV set.

[agranero]

While that in UK: they used a similar technology for a different purpose: a TV detector van to find people that had a TV but didn't pay the TV tax. When I saw about TV van detectors on a book (it explained that was for countries where you needed a license to have a TV) I thought it was talking about of Eastern Europe like Romania, Albania, East Germany, etc...not even URSS would do that. But no: it was UK searching people that evaded the TV tax...UK and their taxes: big houses have windows closed with bricks to this day: a relic of the times of the Window Tax.

[ManiacalMichael]

Very interesting film, I know "TV detector" vans were used in the UK, but never realized they were also used here in the US, albeit for a slightly different reason.

[andywolan]

10:20 - that location has excellent TV reception, and an insane number of TV channels.

[LarryBlowers]

I highly doubt the numbers claimed in this film I believe there inflated and exaggerated.

[rayceeya]

That's more stations than we had with CABLE back in the 80s. At least in my hometown of 1, 500ppl.

[hugh]

I dont know how easy it was to 'hear' the local oscillator of TVs. Manufacturers were required by the FCC to limit its radiation so as to not interfere with nearby TVs. And people in high-rises?

[RodgerMudd]

The SMART TV tells all, just like the cable box or Dish boxes. Your phone tells all including location. Social media and online shopping tell the rest. The computer system knows you better than you know yourself. The world will be controlled and enslaved like never before. You won't know it and in fact ask for more control. I have seen the roll out of this.Glad I will never see the end result before my time on this world is up. I lived most of my life relatively free. The more information the Beast is fed the bigger it gets. Knowledge is power, power is control. As control grows so does enslavement and less freedom of choice.

[marcseen]

5:18 The "advanced electronic device' has CALBEST POLL - O - METER written on it with a black marker pen! 🤣

[dalecomer]

The choice of a VW Type 2 seems unusual for the time. The channels used in the tests filmed were exactly those in operation in L.A. in 1956.