Nearly a decade after Netflix went over-the-top, at least a full decade after the launch of YouTube, and more than two decades since Bruce Springsteen first sang of having “57 channels and nothin’ on,” the video industry, which we used to call the TV industry, is still wrestling with the problem of content discovery.
If anything, the problem is getting worse, not better, as the volume of programming and the number of program sources are both growing rapidly thanks to the new digital platforms.
Heroic efforts have been made over the years to tame the flood, using search technology, algorithmic recommendation engines and various other big-data strategies. Rovi’s Fan TV, for instance, which it acquired late last year and reintroduced at CES in January, uses voice-activated semantic search and leverages Rovi’s vast trove of video metadata to generate recommendations or locate specific titles in response to natural-language queries. Read More »



