Although ThinkAnalytics is best known as the recommendations engine provider for leading Pay TV operators, the company is increasingly helping channel owners to add multiscreen recommendation for their direct-to-consumer OTT apps. In these circumstances the ambition is complement search to ensure that consumers spend longer interacting with content within the app, whether the recommendations system is pointing them to long-form programming or even to short clips that may in turn lead customers to full episodes of shows.
According to Peter Docherty, Founder & CTO at Think Analytics, there are a few challenges when providing recommendations within single content owner apps. First, they incorporate more varied business models than the typical Pay TV platform or Pay TV aggregated OTT service. Notably, content owner apps can be free-to-view and advertising driven or subscription-based, or they could include a mixture of free and pay. “One of our strengths is our ability to set up the recommendations engine to support the business objectives of our customer,†says Docherty.
He emphasizes that there is more short-form content and clips in the content owner app environment. And he adds: “Content owner OTT services tend to cover lots of devices including Smart TVs and Android and iOS devices. We were designed to support multiplatform recommendations from the start.â€
ThinkAnalytics, which is exhibiting at TV Connect this week, is also seeing more requests for a recommendation engine that is used within an aggregated OTT service that is provided by a Pay TV operator, and which contains content from multiple content owners, both linear and on-demand. This includes the standalone OTT offers that are starting to appear (separate to TV Everywhere services) and Docherty expects to see more of these deployments in future.