Profiling and identification of television viewers

A system for profiling a plurality of identities of a television viewing audience based on the interactivity of the identities with a television, the system comprising:

• means for detecting an initiation of a television viewing session;
• means for detecting a termination of the television viewing session;
• means for monitoring user interactions with the television;
• means for filtering the user interactions into at least one interaction category;
• means for processing the user interactions in each of the at least one interaction categories in order to create at least one category profile for each associated interaction category, wherein each of the at least one category profiles identifies attributes about the user for that category of interaction;
• means for generating an interaction profile by combining all of the category profiles, wherein said monitoring, filtering, processing and generating are continually performed for the television viewing session in order to generate a session profile;
• means for generating a signature profile based on the session profile wherein said generating a signature profile includes correlating the session profile to a plurality of pre-existing signature profiles, determining if the session profile satisfies a correlation threshold with at least one of the pre-existing signature profiles, selecting the pre-existing signature profile having highest correlation value over the correlation threshold, and updating the selected pre-existing signature profile to include the session profile;
• means for comparing the updated signature profile to the plurality of pre-existing signature profiles to determine whether the updated signature profile exceeds a threshold correlation with at least one of the other pre-existing signature profiles;
• and
• means for combining the updated signature profile with a most correlated pre-existing viewing signature profile if the correlation threshold was exceeded.