Neptuny launches enhanced Content Recommendation engine at IPTV World Forum 2009

MILAN — Neptuny, a pioneer in the IPTV sector, will be launching Contentwise 2.5 at IPTV World Forum in Olympia, London from 25th – 27th March 2009. ContentWise 2.5 is the latest release of the real-time Content Recommendation engine specifically designed for Digital Media, that helps both IPTV providers and final users to make IPTV a successful experience. Two exciting new features of ContentWise 2.5 are support for user communities and metadata enrichment rules.

Neptuny’ CEO, Fabio Violante comments “Neptuny’s experience from working with customers and system integrators shows that successful IPTV, Interactive-Cable TV and WebTV services require recommendation systems that can be easily integrated into the existing IPTV ecosystem to enable user interaction and cooperation opportunities similar to those of Internet social networks. ContentWise 2.5 enables IPTV operators to target customers with even more effective recommendations and to overcome metadata availability limitations, thus enabling operators to make customers satisfied while maximizing the value of their Digital TV business.”

The latest release, ContentWise 2.5, provides the following new capabilities:

Support for user communities

ContentWise 2.5 allows users to create and join communities to get recommendations that are related to the tastes and preferences of the community. ContentWise communities allow friends or people sharing common interests (e.g. sports) to receive even more effective recommendations generated by taking into account profiles of people that belong to the same community. These capabilities increase the hit ratio of successful recommendations, thus improving the overall TV experience.

Metadata enrichment rules

Metadata for the content may not be complete or may be too general to refine the recommendations to the user. ContentWise 2.5 has an expert system that can automatically extrapolate additional metadata tags to ensure that only the right content is recommended to the user. ContentWise provides the ability to define (both out-of-the-box and custom) metadata enrichment rules that can be then used to generate additional content metadata. These rules enable ContentWise to identify long-tail contents and genre, e.g. ‘black comedy’, and thus to provide more reliable recommendations based on similar content mechanisms. ContentWise provides a number of out-of-the-box rules that enable operators to quickly enhance the existing metadata without embarking on expensive, manual metadata review processes.

ContentWise also provides the capabilities expected from a leading edge content recommendation engine:

• Recommendations – ContentWise makes recommendations for VOD content, TV Channels, TV programs and programs available on (network) Personal Video Recorder.
• Rating Process – ContentWise collects feedback from the user. The user can either rate a film after watching it or the system will collect information about whether the user watched the whole film or stopped it before it has finished. Explicit preference collection (e.g. favorite genre) is also supported.
• Advanced “Business Rules” – Operators can add additional filtering to the recommendations; these can include parental control filters to stop adult content being viewed/recommended as well as pushing premium content based on a customer’s profile.
• Business Reporting – ContentWise offers online and offline reporting; these reports can assist the operator in content buying by analyzing what their customers would like to purchase as well as feedback from the users experience.