Editorial curation and Rails Builder

OpenTV Platform enables the service operator to control the user experience using a mixture of editorial curation, AI-driven personalized segmentation and AI personalized recommendations. These approaches can be combined via OpenTV Rails Builder which allows the operator to define the pages of the application and the rules for the content & promotions on them.

Editorial Curation

The rails builder allows the operator to define

• Templates
  These make up the pages of the service and can be defined in a hierarchy representing the navigation structure.

• Layouts
  Templates contain Layouts, with each Layout able to be targeted to a different group of devices allowing alternative pages for different devices

• Rails
  Layouts contain Rails. Each rail contains a number of rail items which can include any combination of

  • Manually selected On Demand Content (From operator catalogue or deep-linked)

  • Manually selected Live Events

  • Manually selected Channels with a choice of showing either channel logos or ‘whats on’

  • Nodes of content from a VOD catalogue with a ‘folder’ structure

  • Dynamic Content Groups of content using a search across the metadata (e.g all films with Tom Cruise in)

  • Personalized Content from a recommendation engine

  • Personalized Lists including Continue Watching, Favourites, Purchases

  • Promotional Items (Images + links/QR codes)

  • Custom Items - via an extensible framework for widgets in rails that are custom to the operators' application

Personalization

When a personalized rails are used a large range of use-cases can be enabled by the personalization engine including:

• Content-to-content recommendations (e.g., watch next)

• User-to-content recommendations (e.g., Magazine view)

• Prioritizing manually promoted lists of content (e.g., Halloween-themed content)

• Sorting of lists of content based on user recommendations profile (e.g., sort the catchup, from BBC, in order of what the user is most likely to want to watch)

Segmentation

OpenTV support targeting rails to segments assigned to user profiles. Segments can be generated from a range of sources includes

• Provisioned into the system via CRM API

• Generated by AI profiling of user viewing history against the IAB audience taxonomy

• Device

• Freemium / Premium Users

• Account Location / Current Location

• In home / Out of Home

• On / Off Net

Targeting & A/B Testing

OpenTV support targeting rails to segments. A target can be setup either for all users in the segment, or as part of an A/B test.

In the case of an A/B test it can be defined, for a time period, to show a set of rails (across many templates if required) to a % of the users in that segment, showing the remaining users the control case. OpenTV will gather data about the performance of the test, allowing the operator to compare the A & B groups. If the test is successful the operator can choose to make it available to all users in that segment.

Scheduling

Targeting can also be used to schedule rails to groups of consumers/all consumers. The scheduling view is provided in Operator Console to enable users to easily visualize and schedule rails to fit in with live events/seasonal promotions.

Preview Mode

Rails Builder supports a preview mode that allows you to see the rail layout inline in your ‘web’ Application as a specific segment.