This report draws from extensive industry engagement, and offers critical insights for anyone who wants to understand the future for content recommendation engines – a core personalization technology within video.  

Despite a growing footprint among end-users, the service obtainable market for content recommendation engines (CRE) is set to contract by 38% over the next five years. This is largely due to a 61% collapse in per user pricing, by 2029.

This new forecast from Rethink TV finds that this is part of a broader wave of commoditization. With the advent of Online Video Platforms, CRE are among a suite of technologies that have been bundled into the category of personalization: UX/UI, marketing, content management and ad tech. Recommendations vendors have been reacting to this for years, looking for buoyancy via M&A, or broadening their horizons into personalization and advertising.

This collapse in value occurs despite CRE nearing 100% penetration across global premium video services, with Pay TV operators – as well as up and coming AVoD and FAST platforms – making their first forays into CRE, especially in emerging markets.

Much of the market has been lost to in-house builds, with every OTT platformed that is owned by a major content studio or one of the FAANG tech giants operating an internal recommendations engine. As a result, competition is hotter than ever among CRE vendors to secure new deals and – more commonly – steal existing ones.

Some key discussion themes and questions answered in the PDF report:

• Market trends and predictions
• Current suppliers and technologies
• The arrival of AI and ML
• The genAI explosion
• Metadata
• Why is such an essential technology falling off a cliff in terms of value?
• Which of the small-shop vendors are prime targets for acquisition?
• Why are many video services reluctant to apply genAI technologies directly to their end users, and when will we see genAI adoption ramp up?

Key numbers to 2029 in the XLS dataset:

Global numbers, with regional breakdowns for: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, MENA

Pay TV, SVoD, AVOD and FAST Premium Video Users with Content Recommendation Engines:

• Subscriber numbers
• Revenue per User
• Total Addressable Market
• In-House Spend
• Vendor Revenue

If you would like to ask us any questions about this report, please contact the Rethink team.