recommendations

Vizimo, a UK company which recently launched a service that it bills as enabling consumers to discover broadcast and on-demand programming that is relevant to their individual tastes, manage their programming choices, and discuss programming with other users (note: for more on the company and its service, see the article published on itvt.com, September 29th), and the UK's Press Association, which--in addition to its journalistic activities--claims to "maintain the most comprehensive database of TV and radio listings available in the UK," announced Monday that they have signed a technology partnership to create a new range of VOD discovery serv

Video search specialist, TV Genius (whose customers include AOL, Sky and ITV.com), last week announced the launch of a converged, three-screen TV search and recommendation engine for the Web, mobile and TV, which it says "builds on [its] success in mobile and Web to deliver [a] solution for scheduled, VOD and premium TV programming." According to the company, its Content Discovery Platform (CDP) and Relevance Engine have been built from the ground up specifically to meet the needs of TV discovery, providing richer content aggregation and allowing viewers to discover programming from a range of sources, including broadcast TV and VOD on television or online.

Interactive TV and advanced advertising technology provider, OpenTV (note: Kudelski is currently finalizing the process of acquiring full control of the company--see the article published on itvt.com, November 16th), said Monday that Australian pay-TV operator, Foxtel, which is a longtime OpenTV customer, has launched its next-generation platform in collaboration with the company.

Three different companies--SetJam, Yidio and Clicker--contacted [itvt] last week to let us know about solutions they have developed to make it easier for consumers to discover the programs they want to watch from the increasing amount of programming now available online. All three solutions are designed to facilitate online access to full-length, professionally produced and legally available programming.

Taboola, a New York-based provider of video recommendation engines, last week announced a partnership with broadband video publishing solutions provider, Brightcove, that it says will see it providing its personalized video recommendation and advertising engine to Kiplinger.com, iMediaConnection.com and other Brightcove customers. As a result of its partnership and technology integration with Brightcove, Taboola says, it now provides "the world's first personalized video recommendation engine for leading online publishers in an easy 'drag and drop' scenario."

Jinni, an Israeli company that offers a semantic search-and-recommendation engine that it says is based on "content genetics and user psychographics," on Wednesday officially announced the appointment of Mike Pohl as CEO. According to Jinni, Pohl--who has been serving as its CEO since at least August (see the article published on itvt.com, August 12th)--has 25 years of telecommunications industry experience and a decade of focus on next-generation services such as VOD and advanced advertising.

Neptuny, a Milan-based company that offers a predictive content recommendation engine, called ContentWise, for digital TV, said Monday that ContentWise 3.0, which is slated to be released later this month, will offer several improvements. The most significant improvement, according to the company, will be a "user-friendly Web interface to define and apply business rules to better control the list of content to be recommended to target users according to specific marketing criteria." For example, the company says, the new release will allow business rules to be defined in order to assign higher relevance to specific content--"i.e.

VOD, IPTV and advanced advertising technology provider, SeaChange International, announced Wednesday the launch of a new VOD search and navigation tool for cable and IPTV operators that is powered by technology from Jinni, a company that offers a semantic search-and-recommendation engine which it says is based on content genetics and user psychographics (note: the company, whose CEO is Mike Pohl, formerly president and CEO of nCUBE, a pioneering VOD technology provider that was sold to C-COR--which was itself subsequently sold to Arris--back in 2004, recently formed a partnership with OpenTV--