TiVo unveils Personalised Content Discovery platform
July 25, 2017
TiVo has unveiled its new fully-integrated Personalised Content Discovery platform. The new platform provides video operators with a comprehensive suite of content discovery features that combine TiVo’s conversational voice search with personalised search and recommendations. The platform also features powerful analytics capabilities that enable operators to conduct A/B testing; thus, giving operators the ability to optimise their operations in real-time.
With fully-integrated conversational services, TiVo’s Personalised Content Discovery platform leverages voice search making it easy for a user to ask, “What’s on television tonight?” and get highly-relevant personalised search results. Instead of bringing up the whole TV guide with 300+ channels, the response will highlight the top 10 television programmes that the user is most likely to be interested in, based on their viewing behaviour and interests. This integration is exceptionally crucial as more and more customers turn to voice search, with 30.5% of Amazon Echo, Dot or Google Home owners stating that they use voice assistants to help them find something to watch, according to TiVo’s most recent Video Trends Report.
TiVo’s Personalised Content Discovery platform also supports contextual voice queries, which allow users to easily narrow down results within a specific context, thus eliminating the need to string together extremely long queries with unnatural phrasing to achieve the same results. For example, if a user was to ask, “Find me films with Tom Hanks,” after the initial search results are displayed, the user can simply say “only the comedies” to filter the results to find comedies starring Tom Hanks. In addition, the conversational search capability spans across all content catalogues available to the consumer, such as linear TV, VoD or OTT programming. As a result, the platform recognises what the user is subscribed to and can be set to only return what is available to that specific user within their packages.
“For voice search and discovery to be truly effective, the user must be able to refine and explore through conversation,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst, nScreenMedia. “Solutions such as TiVo’s will be invaluable in helping operators deliver conversational discovery tools that allow their customers to more fully exploit the content that is available to them.”
TiVo’s Personalised Content Discovery platform has a fully integrated backend business console that provides management and real-time tuning of search results, allowing service providers to easily improve the user experience and generate more engagement from viewer searches. Operators can use rules to drive internal business objectives, such as boosting more VoD titles in voice searches to promote broader category awareness. Operators also benefit from a decreased cost in ownership, since they can quickly make real-time changes without requiring extra support from engineering teams.
“Thanks to our fully-integrated approach, service providers can provide their customers with the flexibility of conversational search, going beyond traditional keywords and delivering a truly personalised experience that also drives their own business objectives internally,” said Pratik Patel, director of product management, Advanced Search and Recommendations, TiVo. “In the past, it was an incredibly timely and labour-intensive process to update search results. Now, changes can be created almost instantaneously, generating stronger, more relevant results for viewers while improving overall customer loyalty and engagement.”