Peter Docherty, Founder & CTO, ThinkAnalytics
Until recently, pay-TV and OTT services have generally been limited to offering the provider’s own linear TV and VOD content and a handful of third-party OTT apps, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime. A small number of service providers have added aggregation – giving viewers the ability to search for content across one or two third-party apps as well as their own content catalogues. But in most cases the viewer has to launch each OTT app separately to search for content.
This is simply unsustainable as the volume and velocity of content choices grow exponentially. We’ll see subscribers vote with their wallets.
Super-aggregation offers a clear route to a better model. By giving subscribers a fantastic experience across all TV, catch up and streaming services in a one-stop shop, service providers can boost that all important viewer engagement.
Keys to super-aggregation content discovery success
Key to a successful super-aggregation service is the need to shield viewers from the siloed and complex underbelly of multiple content sources and catalogues so that they can quickly discover compelling content to watch. For this to work, providers need massive scalability in the cloud, operational efficiencies to control cloud costs, and a frictionless way to discover content across vast and growing catalogues of previously siloed content.
The Think360 content discovery platform is architected for the cloud era and is the first solution with the massive scalability required to power personalized recommendations and universal search across unlimited video sources and in multiple languages. In fact, Think360 on AWS is the first offering to break through this barrier.
With cloud-native technologies and AI/ML algorithms and techniques designed to support cross-catalogue recommendations, Think360 makes intelligent search and personalized recommendations far more scalable in the cloud than was previously possible. As content catalogues continue to multiply, scalability becomes critical and, using AI to predict loads, Think360 can auto-scale using AWS in advance of peak viewing periods to support hundreds of millions of viewers.
This scalability breakthrough means that service providers can now offer super-aggregation services powered by personalized recommendations and universal search, across unlimited, siloed home-grown and third-party OTT apps, as well as linear, VOD, catch-up and DVR content (both STB and cloud recordings), and in multiple languages.
The information science ontology has also been expanded to more than 35,000 content features that support super-aggregation, allowing the platform to:
- Understand a huge variety of content/content types, and categorize content across all catalogues in a consistent manner so all learnings can be applied to all catalogues
- Ingest and deliver search and recommendations across multiple catalogues
- Learn from viewing across catalogues to build a single viewer profile
- Support use cases that can mix and match which catalogues the recommendations are from
Think360 is currently powering super-aggregation services in multiple languages, providing personalized recommendations and universal search across as many as 11 OTT apps.
Read more about customer success stories:
- Untapping Value of Viewer Engagement: Liberty Global Case Study
- Tata Sky Binge delivers aggregation powered by ThinkAnalytics
Learn why our super-aggregation solution is award winning: