Next gen personalisation engines must deliver with “the speed of thought”

Broadcasters and OTT providers will need personalisation engines that move “with the speed of thought” if they want to add value and prevent churn, according to experts from Firstlight Media and ThinkAnalytics.

The two companies, which have joined forces to launch a new cloud-native personalisation platform, shared their insights during the IBC SHOWCASE session, Knowing the ‘What’ and the ‘Why’ of Personalization.

According Andre Christensen, CEO and co-founder of FirstLight, personalisation and user engagement requires capabilities that are built into different parts of the platform.

“Next generation services need to be more iterative and experimental if they are to drive user engagement,” he said.

At the front end he added that crucial areas included storefront management and the ability to perform automated A/B testing on different carousels to see how they influence user engagement.

“Next generation services need to be more iterative and experimental… if content providers start to iterate today they will have a better service in three months time,” he argued.

At the back end, an intelligent interpretation of metadata will also ensure a better user experience, according to ThinkAnalytics CEO Gabriel Berger, whose firm claims to process over six billion recommendations a day for its Tier1 clients.

“Handling big data is one of the more prosaic parts of what we do.The industry doesn’t need any more data - it needs insights, intelligence and sprite decision-making so that customers can be kept engaged at all times,” he said.

With over 240 OTT players on the market Berger added that the challenge was delivering personalisation at speed, before the user has a chance to disengage.

“Velocity is almost as challenging as volume these days. People will disconnect so quickly from a provider without any penalty, you have to move with the speed of thought of the consumer.”

During the session Firstlight showcased its CMS while ThinkAnalytics’ demonstrated its cloud-native Content Discovery Platform.

Used together, the firms claim to be able to enable personalized viewing experiences that combine the best of human editorial and AI-powered recommendations.