popularity, these operators are
using partnerships with these
media services to increase
consumer stickiness. More than
500 of these partnerships had
been made worldwide at the end
of 2019, up by more than 22 per
cent year-over-year. This number
will continue to increase as new
services launch, and more markets
follow this global aggregation
trend.”
“We have been forecasting
that universal search and
recommendations will become
more widely required and we
are seeing this in our customer
base today,” reports Docherty.
“We have deployments with four or five OTT
VoD offerings integrated into a single platform,
or where a pay-TV provider integrates multiple
OTT catalogues and has a universal search
capability across all of them.”
“TiVo has been at the forefront of the push
to integrate VoD services into an aggregated
content discovery experience for the consumer,”
states Dawes. “In 2013, we enabled the first
pay-TV operator integration of Netflix with
Virgin Media in the UK. Since then we’ve
continued to expand the number of services
which are aggregated across both international
and local providers in line with our customers
and consumers’ needs. Most recently our TiVo
Stream 4K product, which was launched to
critical acclaim in May, is bringing content
aggregation in the streaming world to the next
level for a whole new generation of consumers
who don’t subscribe to traditional pay-TV.”
“The TiVo experience focuses on what we
term an ‘app-free environment’ where you don’t
have to constantly switch between apps or even
have to remember where that show you wanted
to watch resides this month. By aggregating the
content into a single experience that is driven
by a superior level of rich, descriptive metadata
and a holistic search and recommendation
experience, the customer can spend more time
watching and less time flicking through apps.”
VOICE. As to the emergence of voice-driven
search and discovery, Bisson suggests it works
very well when you know what you want to
watch. “The uptake of voice-enabled devices
is perhaps being driven by other things than
wanting to discover something to watch
on the telly, but it is getting to a
compelling installed base. Some
people are doing it well, Roku,
for example where it works
across platform and across
service. Other perhaps do it
less well. I think it will become
a fairly standard and accepted
part of TV navigation going
forward.”
Adams says Voice is
widely available now and fast
evolving. “Simple queries
along the lines of : ‘Find me
show X’ are giving way to a
more conversational search
process wherein a string of
commands are spoken. Voice
search is complex and behind
the scenes, vast amounts of
descriptive data are required
to narrow a set of results to
the one the viewer wants.”
For example, take a query
like: ‘Play that show about old
school New York ad executives
starring Jon Hamm’. In order
for the service to recognise
that the show being referenced is Mad Men, it
would need to understand all the underlying
elements of the show from its subject matter
and setting to its stars to where the content is
currently available. This is where broad and deep
descriptive metadata is so critical.”
“Across all the subscription drivers asked
about in the Kantar Entertainment on Demand
study, voice control ranks last as a driver,”
admits Sunnebo. “Voice control is well suited to
many tasks, but in consumers’ minds, SVoD is
not one of them.
“Voice certainly helps, and if you have ever
used it, you would understand why,” observes
Smith-Chaigneau. “Voice still requires you to
know what to ask for, i.e., Channel Up, Go To
BBC 2 is not the same as trying to locate the
latest movie or TV show that you cannot quite
remember the title of.”
“According to Omdia’s consumer surveys,
more than half of average consumers are not
interested in voice control in video services, with
less than 20 per cent claiming to currently use
it,” reports Signorelli. “This level of interest has
been consistent over the last two years, implying
that voice controls still need to prove their
capabilities and integrate their functionality into
more services and devices.”
TREND. “We believe that using voice to search
for known content is clearly a trend. While
voice will continue to gain prominence
in how users interact with their TVs,
it is still important that users aren’t
“Voice search and
recommendations
will be important.”
Peter Docherty,
Think Analytics
“Hyperpersonalisation
from emotional
understanding
will be the next
big thing.”
- Marcus
Bergström,
Vionlabs
forced to talk if they do not want to, or if they just
cannot talk in certain situations. They need to
feel empowered to interact with the TV using a
modality that works best for them,” says Maier.
“Voice has not caught on yet, but this
doesn’t mean it eventually won’t,” says
Fröhlich. “It will take more time, but we see
that Generation Z is much more open to
voice. The increasing relevance of younger
generations will speed up this process.”
“Voice search and recommendations will
be important,” asserts Docherty. “Just think
about how many of us use smart speakers
in the home now. While some video service
providers are already offering voice capabilities
with in-built microphones in remote controls,
abandon rates in the early offerings were
high. To crack this, providers will adopt, and
some already have, more sophisticated voice
search tools that make use of natural language
analysis to fully understand what the viewer
is looking for. It will be interesting to see the
progress of operator-specific solutions with
near-field microphones in remote controls
compared to integration with smart devices in
the home.”
LEVELLER. “Voice has definitely caught on
in the entertainment discovery world,” affirms
Dawes. “It is a great leveller that flattens the
user experience and bypasses some of the way
content was presented in the past with strict,
but not always user friendly, content trees.
TiVo has focused on enabling Conversational
voice search which uses Natural Language
Processing (NLP) to truly understand what
the consumer is saying, including their intent
and context, to deliver an experience that is
above and beyond simple title searches. Since
our first launches in 2015, we have grown the
service across both our own consumer and our
operator footprints to today provide focused
entertainment search in multiple languages. A
key proof point is in showing how consumers
have embraced voice. The average consumer
would use text search once or twice a month
whereas those with voice search are using it
35+ times to find content.”
“The conversational aspect of a voice search
is also crucial as it aligns with how consumers
think. You can’t always remember the title of
a show, and sometimes you forget the name
of an actor, but you do know they played a
certain character. Being able to ask questions
like: ‘What’s the film about a robbery with the
actor who plays Bond?’. You’re looking for
Logan Lucky but trying to do that without a
conversation voice system that is underpinned
by rich knowledge graph-based metadata
would be a non-starter. Consumers won’t
completely abandon the remote control for
all interaction, but as they use voice and
experience its extraordinary simplicity, they
continue to use it help them find, watch and
enjoy their entertainment.”
EUROMEDIA 15