Friday, April 13, 2007

Where's Waldo

Recommendation or search? The battle is just beginning to help viewers discover their video content.

Recently, two online personalization and content recommendation companies received 10 figures funding each (ChoiceStream raised $26MM for their 3rd round; Aggregate Knowledge raised $20MM in their 2nd round). While at first glance, these P&R companies many use their new funds to sell their services as online behavior targeting uses (AK specifically earmarked their $$ for sales and business development), it would only be naturally to extend these uses to online video.

Why online video? Because it can be a trojan horse to the home, particularly if the personalization and recommendation engines can be ported seamlessly across multiple platforms (broadcast via set top box, online and mobile). The software that powers these platforms can engage the viewers, which then leads to better ways to advertise, market and sell to those viewers.

TV networks are pushing a lot of video content to their sites and at NATPE this past January, many television executives verbalized their valid concerns for video discovery. As more video becomes available online (especially from television networks), online viewers will have a tough time finding videos that interest them. While video search engines (Blinkx, Truveo, Google Video, etc..) are now coming of age, they still dependent on good metadata and tagging taxonmy, both of which are managed by "gatekeepers", to enable video searching by keywords. Keyword searching may be perfect for text content, but would it work for videos as well?

iTunes, Netflix and Tivo recommend video titles based on past experiences (ie ratings) by oneself and/or from other similar raters (ie friends). In these cases, searched content is specifically restricted to within each of their walls, which then returns the most relevant recommendations without the long-tailed outliers corrupting the results. Taking such cues, TVGuide is launching phase 1 of Project Stingray that limits its search to only 65 relevant video sites. I can only postulate that phase 2 would incorporate personalization and recommendations to video searches, with more relevant results given heavier weightings. Viewers searching for "The Office" are more likely to look for the television show rather than homemade videos of your co-workers' shenanigans at the office. However, by drawing a distinction between the two, amateur gems can still be discovered and the integrity of user-control viewing is maintained. It is “TVGuide” after all.

Labels: , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home