I never let episodes in a series autoplay on netflix, but the other night I did and it paused a few minutes in to make me click to continue.<p>I assumed this was to protect their bandwidth. They don't want users streaming a whole series while they sleep (or aren't in the room for that matter).<p>I did wonder if the interruption was based on time of day, since it was late at night.
Seems trivial because the user has to be wearing a device which monitors your vitals. Well, yeah, probably not too difficult to guess if someone is asleep or not. Do it without forcing me to buy a device to wear and I will be thoroughly impressed.
I wish there was a way to hack the fitbit at the phone level. They do have a public api, but only for getting exercise/sleep data at 15 min intervals. I think the real exciting applications are sending custom alerts/text/vibrations, but this doesn't seem possible.<p>Personally I hardly use the fitness features on my fitbit. All I really wanted was a minimalist smart watch - a clock function and call/sms alerts, and something that's low profile on my wrist.
It'd be nice to see a solution to this problem for Hulu. It seems like they accomplish this already by failing to load ads. On my Wii there's a good chance that ads won't load and it forces me to go back to the menu or hit 'retry'. At first it was annoying but now I've come to rely on ads failing so that I don't skip too many episodes after falling asleep. Though you probably can't get me to wear something that monitors my vitals.
wow - 1st world problems :) It doesn't say much for the things people are watching if they are falling asleep watching them. Maybe a night or two without tv would be a good idea.