Reelgood and Samba TV partner to make smart TVs more personal

Discover your next favorite show on Reelgood with recommendations powered by Samba TV

With the goal of helping people spend less time searching, and more time watching, Reelgood and Samba TV have partnered to bring Reelgood’s streaming guide and Samba’s recommendation technology to more than 20 million Samba-enabled smart TVs today, with expectations to more than double by the end of 2020.

Reelgood started by building a single interface, a unified guide for all your streaming services—personalized to show only your content. Once you set your services (for example, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Showtime and Prime Video), you can browse, track, and play all the shows and movies available to you. Normally, the average US consumer spends 36 minutes flipping across four streaming services every night—but with Reelgood, consumers spend less than two.

Reelgood has partnered with Samba because our teams share an obsession with making TV personal. As a content recommendation engine, Samba analyzes past viewing behavior to develop algorithms that help people find new shows. Samba’s machine learning technology learns from viewership patterns and recognizes what people love to watch. It then uses that information to surface best-in-class recommendations across all the screens we use to watch TV. It also develops analytics for media companies to make more data-driven decisions about what shows to produce and sponsor. Challenging legacy TV ratings, Samba’s vision is that no more great shows get canceled, and content with niche appeal or minority audiences don’t get overlooked by advertisers.

What will this partnership mean for users? You can now access Reelgood on a Smart TV from select brands that have adopted the joint solution. We’ve had huge demand from users to bring the Reelgood experience to TVs, so we are excited to partner with Samba to quickly expand the reach of our app onto millions of TV screens around the world.

Going beyond Smart TVs, even Reelgood users on a laptop browser or mobile device will be getting an upgrade—Reelgood users will have the choice to enable Samba’s powerful recommendations engine as an additional feature in late 2019. This solution addresses the complaint that recommendations within any individual streaming provider are limited to what’s available in that service and drive people to video which serves the business model instead of what the consumer might actually enjoy.

“We have long held the view that the best recommendations cut across providers and are powered purely by your own taste, unbiased by business model considerations. We have a track record of using data and technology to improve the viewing experience for linear TV, and now with Reelgood, Samba’s core technology applies to the broad catalog of streaming video across all major streaming services,” said Ashwin Navin, CEO and co-founder of Samba TV.

“This partnership greatly accelerates our vision of being the launching point for all viewing around the world. Working with the Samba TV team allows us to quickly address our users’ demand for Reelgood on the 10-foot experience as well as leverages Samba’s state of the art technology to offer our users best-in-industry recommendations.” — David Sanderson, CEO and founder of Reelgood

Here’s to the future of TV—ever personalized, ever easier.