I recently got a PVR and it's changed how I think of TV. I think of TV more as a form of email now. Every day, my PVR is bombarded with hundreds of hours of TV, most of which is spam.
One solution used for email is Bayesian filtering. This uses known choices of wanted-v-spam by a user to predict which new items are likely to be spam using Bayesian statistics. The Mozilla-mail version is very good.
Applied to a PVR, I would simply watch the programs that I want, deleting those that I don't want to see through (often having either skimmed through or watched just a few minutes). When deleting, I would need to say whether I has seen the episode/film before, and the PVR has enough information to decide future likely decisions on viewing. No programming, no entering keywords, and no spyware.
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I am not a TiVo owner, but it is my understanding that they offer previous viewing analysis to recommend additional recording opportunities.
More than that, the TiVo acctually will record those "suggestions" for you, although not at the detriment of "chosen" recordings
I'm not saying that this provides features that Tivo doesn't have. This is about giving competitors (e.g. MythTV) a way to provide similar functionality without getting sued by Tivo, since Tivo uses different methods.