TV Everywhere Only Matters If It’s Personal
Written By: David Maher-Roberts, CEO, The Filter
Consumers these days are driven by content, not by any loyalty to a particular provider or technology. Their favourite videos are what really keep them engaged.
The success of TV Everywhere will clearly be based on people being able to watch the programs they want to watch, when they want to watch them. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for TV and video services, and there’s no reason why this will change as long as they can still get high quality and relevant content.
That said, the issue with the “everything, anywhere, anytime” model (regardless of whether it’s OTT or IPTV) is that once you have used the service to watch that must-see movie or that can’t-possibly-miss-it episode of Glee, what do you do next? People frequently experience paralysis brought on by too much choice. We’ve ALL experienced that feeling on one occasion or another.
So what happens next? The majority of us take the easy route and watch what everyone else is watching, undermining the true potential of any multi-device, anytime service. And our inability to navigate and discover new and exciting shows gets worse as providers add more and more content.
Accessibility is of course an issue and one that TV Everywhere is trying to solve, but once you’ve lead the horse to water, how are you going to get it to drink?
Making Content Relevant to the Individual
Unlocking the true power of TV Everywhere requires making search, navigation and discovery interfaces more intelligent, personalized, and, therefore, relevant on all devices. In simple terms, the content services need to work harder so people don’t have to. Content should not be left to chance, not in this day and age when there is so much competition for our time and increasingly our viewing.
In our experience providing relevance platforms with content services for customers like NBC.com, Vudu, Warner Bros and major IPTV services in Europe, the results are industry-standard-busting levels of engagement when compared to non-personalized or editorial recommendations.
Here are some of the principles we use when working with content services on personalization and relevance:
- Focus on users/demand: mood, context, motivation, content perception. To date, content services focus 80% of time/budget/resources on solving distribution and supply issues, and only 20% on solving the demand issues. This needs to be inverted.
- Tap into the data exhaust. Connected devices produce large amounts of data. Any content service that wants to provide a more intelligent and personalized viewer experience must log all of the data created by connected devices.
- Make use of all data types and across all connected devices. Traditional content services usually use only metadata (descriptions, images, trailers, actors, etc) to provide recommendations. These data are important, but a personalized service needs to get more granular and understand what people are consuming at what time on what day and on what device to provide truly relevant, personalized navigation and discovery.
The different types of data that you need to log and make use of for a more intelligent service include:
a. Metadata – Descriptions, images, cast members, genre, year, etc…
b. Context data – Location, device, time of day, day of week, language
c. Social data – Tweets, friend recommendations, status updates, Likes
d. Taste – Individual consumption, interaction with content - Create and overlay the graphs. We achieve true relevance by using all of theses different data types to create an Item Graph (how the library of content is connected) and a Taste Graph. Overlaying one on top of the other, allowing for different contexts, will deliver the most relevant results.
- Optimize and measure the effect of each tweak
And finally, a relevance system will not provide the best results if just taken off the shelf and plugged in. It requires ongoing optimization (some human and some machine-learning).
True relevance and personalization will be delivered only by technology that accounts for people’s many tastes – influenced by location, time of day, day of week, the device they are on, what they are doing and who they are with. Delivering content on this level will go a long way in helping TV Everywhere reach its potential.
Learn more about The Filter at www.TheFilter.com.
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