US recommendation specialist Digitalsmiths has landed a deal with UK based zeebox, which is a TV companion application, which bills itself as a sidekick to your TV viewing. The Digitalsmiths technology will operate on a remote server and power video discovery across all of zeebox’s supported platforms.
zeebox was only launched in the UK in 2011, and has already made it to the US as a companion app, through deals with Comcast, NBC, Viacom and HBO, where it was downloaded 1 million times in its first three months. Subsequently it has also been launched in Australia through Network Ten and Foxtel.
The DigitalSmiths technology will power the new zeebox “Recommended For You” feature offering personalized recommendations based on past viewing behavior, but only on TV selected from inside the zeebox application. It will also power the ‘Similar Shows’ button.
‘Our users tell us that program discovery is a key use for second screen applications,” said Anthony Rose, Co-Founder and CTO at zeebox. “People love the zeebox program guide, but scrolling through a list of 150 channels is not the future. What you want is a small set of program recommendations, just for you, that you can watch right now. Our new personalized recommendation system offers that, based on your viewing history, likes and more.
DigitalSmiths pushed out a white paper last year which showed that consumers were begging for a better TV experience, with over 50% saying they would consider keeping their existing cable service if only it was easier to ‘find something to watch on TV.’
CEO Ben Weinberger told us at the time, ‘Several years ago Hollywood and televised Sports wanted to be able to recognize particular scenes, so we built a system that uses object recognition and facial recognition within scenes and at the time used speech to text utilities and location recognition, so that we could allow editors to picks all the scenes with a particular sportsman or actor or at a particular place, to speed their edits.’
‘We did this for tens of thousands of movies, for the owners, and sold that system for ten years for things like marketing of clips or selection of promotional clips, and stock footage licensing and pre-releases and re-releases which are different from the original movie.’
‘Much of that today sits inside our video search engine, what we call our Seamless Discovery Engine,’ said Weinberger. The company has since discarded speech to text, as too inaccurate, and added many other dimensions.
Faultline has been on a bit of a mission to get TV services to understand that this is the type of service that needs to drive modern pay TV experiences and there has been a running fight to landgrab as many major US pay TV customers as possible between DigitalSmiths, which has a contract at Time Warner, ThinkAnalytics and Jinni. Other social buzz specialists have also emerged as well as some using semantic Knowledge Graph-based systems such as Veveo and more traditional suppliers have come out of middleware provision such as French player Viaccess-Orca.
But this way in, via a companion app has also opened up and only needs the co-operation of the pay TV and channels suppliers, not their hard cash or commitment, and it represents a way into the market.
Shazam is the other US native companion app which started out life as a music identification service, and is really just used as a way of identifying TV programs from their sound track, and has none of the companion features that zeebox has/ zeebox offers the ability to watch what you favorite celebrity is watching, and lets you buy things seen on the screen. It also enables broadcasters to deliver synchronized polls, quizzes, trivia and other interactive widgets directly to fans.