Ok, I'm feeling rather naïve and waking up slowly this morning. Why do they care to know that? I mean, what about their business does that help them improve? Because, I think we can take it somewhat for granted that such information probably isn't something which the individuals involved, their customers in this situation, enjoy knowing is being collected about them. "Hey, you know that activity you probably consider rather private, we like to record everything about it we easily can, because umm... customer service."
If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.
It probably lets them know how long the movies they produce should be. If it's too long before any action is in there then people move on. If it's not long enough then the customer doesn't get what they want. Optimizing this means that they can take a single 8 hour shoot, that'll produce maybe an hour and a half of good footage (just pulling numbers out of my ass) and make more than one video of the right length to get the most profit out of it.
Ok, thanks, I'm restored to cynical now... and the business advantage to be found here is that they can go even further than just optimizing length to match what people want, they can make them just a bit shorter than more people would like, so people will buy two instead of just one.
It's probably an extra-cost service to the hotel guest. The hotel wants to know how much/how often the service is used so they can optimize it for their needs. No sense paying for more bandwidth than you need.
In any case, they probably have no need for individual statistics: the aggregated watching habits of guests is enough to provide useful information.
If I kept track of the porn watching habits of my neighbors, that would be considered strange and maybe rather pervy. And I don't see how it makes a difference in that evaluation whether they are or aren't renting the tv they use from me.