Digitalsmiths video content discovery deployment begins at Charter

Tuesday, May 13th, 2014
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Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery® for Cloud-Based, Video Content Discovery Deployment Begins on Charter

  • Digitalsmiths Powering Personalized Search, Recommendations and Sports Discovery for Charter Communications Subscribers

DURHAM, NC — Digitalsmiths, the leader in personalized video search and recommendations and a subsidiary of TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), today announced that Charter Communications began deployment of the Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery® platform to more than 5 million Charter TV and Internet customers. Charter Communications is leveraging the key features within Seamless Discovery including Digitalsmiths’ Unified Data Service™ and Business Console and numerous video discovery applications spanning personalized search, recommendations and sports discovery across platforms and devices. Digitalsmiths technology allows Charter Communications viewers to increase engagement and discover the relevant content they want faster and on channels they may not have normally surfed.

The Charter TV application, available on iOS and Android platforms, includes Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery. In the coming months Charter will deploy Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery on additional platforms and devices.

“Charter continues to improve the overall entertainment experience for our customers with modern discovery features that provide relevant content recommendations,” said Rich DiGeronimo, Charter’s senior vice president, product and strategy. “In addition to improving the customer experience, Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery’s architecture easily integrates into Charter’s data aggregation systems to power the Charter TV App today, and additional cloud-based user interfaces in the near future.”

Ben Weinberger, co-founder of Digitalsmiths, said, “Gone are the days of consumers blindly channel surfing to find something to watch. We enable viewing personalization, where content is finding the consumer. Charter recognizes the power of search and recommendation services and leverages the Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery platform to provide an overall more personalized experience for their subscribers across multiple devices.”

Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery can blend multiple video sources, such as Linear TV, Premium Channels, VOD, and OTT offerings, with other data sources to deliver multiple types of personalized recommendation features including personalized recommendations for individuals, group recommendations, personalized browsing and item similarity.

With a growing number of channels airing sports content, many of which are not on the networks commonly searched by viewers, it may become difficult for viewers to find their favorite teams. Digitalsmiths Sports Discovery allows Charter to quickly surface and promote teams and sporting events, reducing the time spent channel surfing and increasing their customer engagement with more channels. The Charter deployment includes an “excitement” factor for sports; for example, a user will be alerted to visit a different channel when a game is tied in overtime, or an underdog is about to beat a number one ranked team.