Vizimo personalizes the EPG

Part 3 of 6 – read part 1 and part 2 here.

Improving the television’s electronic programming guide (EPG) by moving away from the typical grid layout to figure out how to quickly and efficiently help viewers find what they are looking for should be an important priority for television operators, said Jayant Dasari, research analyst at Parks Associates, in an interview on interactive TV. He posed the question, “If you have a linear channel lineup, video on-demand and content on the digital video recorder, then you add online content, how can the viewer possibly find what might potentially be of interest to them?”

“The operators can’t expect them to scroll through thousands of listings to find one program they might watch for 15 minutes,” Dasari added.

Personalized TV guide developer Vizimo is entering the United States market with its API-based service designed to solve this problem. The service will enable any service provider to add TV personalization and recommendations to its own products across the set-top box, Web and mobile. The software includes three tiers: V-TV free, an open, free service for operators to send a program reference and get back recommendations based on the standard body of TV content in that particular geography, V-TV Plus, which adds in personalization, and V-TV OD, which incorporates VOD content. In both V-TV Plus and V-TV OD, operators can create and maintain profiles using Vizimo’s profiling capability to then serve profile-based and time-sensitive recommendations and specific content sources.  Service providers can also define a bias towards recommendations from specific sources, such as premium or pay-per-view channels.

“We designed our server-side technology to work with scheduled and non-linear, on-demand content and, as far as possible, to blend non-linear with scheduled viewing to make it as passive as possible as opposed to other systems that require you to leave your viewing, which really isn’t the promise of TV,” said Simon Steward, Vizimo’s chief executive officer. “It’s sitting back and being entertained and if something peaks your interest, leaving. It weaves on-demand in with typical user experience.”

Vizimo’s goal is to help people work out what to watch if they could watch anything, Steward said, by taking an imdb.com-like approach to let consumers delve deeper and interact with the content they are seeking.  Everything consumers search is reflected in their profile, which enables recommendations based on their interests. Vizimo employs many different algorithms, everything from what friends recommend, Twitter-style, to topic-based recommendations to offer a comprehensive total set of suggestions.