Building the Next-Generation TV Guide
Written by: Yosi Glick, Jinni Co-Founder and President
Nowadays television viewers have more content options than ever before: hundreds of linear channels, thousands of VOD titles, and even more content on the DVR. This new era in entertainment calls for a new type of TV guide, one that helps viewers easily find what they want.
In developing a guide with greater usability, you need to consider five core principles.
The User Is at the Center
Current guides are content-centric. Long, static, and unsuited to discovery in a rich content environment, they force the user to stick to known shows or channel-zap at random. Guides are also provider-centric: displaying providers’ icons (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) in the main menu puts the user’s preferences (i.e. which movie or show to watch) second.
The next generation of guides will be user-centric. The starting point will be the individual. What are you in the mood to watch? What types of movies and shows do you usually like? What did you watch recently that you enjoyed? Discovery tools will filter the universe of content based on the user’s moods and tastes.
This approach also encourages the user to look beyond the familiar hits and new releases to find what fits his or her preferences in rich content libraries, and to take full advantage of robust multi-channel programming.
The Discovery Process Is Holistic
“Channel zapping” – simply browsing what’s on TV now – is no longer a viable way to decide what to watch. To bring users from a one-size-fits-all consumption model to an experience that fits his or her viewing context and desired effort level, a discovery service should offer a versatile set of easy-to-use tools. For example, a “browse-by-mood” approach might suit a user in an active mindset who is inclined to provide more input to the system in order to refine the recommendations, whereas personalized recommendations fit a user in a passive mindset, and group recommendations (based on analyzing the tastes of several registered users) suit users interested in social viewing.The Catalog Is Meant for Discovery
An intuitive discovery process starts with a catalog that reflects the way users think about content. Genres (comedy, action, etc.) were originally designed for back-office cataloging. By contrast, indexing content by storyline, mood, style, etc. – the language people use to talk about what they watch – can support genuinely intuitive discovery experiences.
A deeper understanding of people is also crucial for personalized discovery. Collaborative filtering, which uses statistical correlations between users and content items – the familiar “people who liked X also like Y” – cannot easily analyze the “whole picture” of a specific user’s tastes. New approaches aim to understand and model each user’s unique, multifaceted tastes. As part of a highly personalized experience, such models can also be used to describe and compare users’ tastes e.g. “You both especially like clever and touching stories about buddies and falling in love.”
The User Interface Is Only as Good as the Underlying Data
The user interface is key to a positive entertainment selection and viewing experience. Most entertainment interfaces look remarkably similar because they’re designed around the “same old” data: keywords such as titles and people, and genres. Data reflecting intuitive categories (moods, storylines) can naturally support innovative, intuitive interfaces.
The Viewing Experience Is Multiplatform
Users watch content on a range of platforms, from PCs and TVs to mobile devices and game consoles. A next-generation guide should work with as many platforms as possible and facilitate viewing wherever the user chooses.
Read more about how you can take advantage of Jinni’s discovery-and-recommendation engine for premium video content with their plug-in to thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK).
Yosi Glick is the Co-Founder and President of Jinni.
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