New Version of Neptuny's TV Recommendation Engine to Facilitate Application of Business Rules

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. push content from specific studio producers that generates higher revenues or create marketing campaigns based on users' tastes and profiles."

According to the company, the new ContentWise user interface for managing business rules is based on portal technology and has been designed so as to be easily customized in order to match specific needs. The UI also provides easy access to standard and custom reports generated by ContentWise's embedded reporting platform, the company says, allowing operators to evaluate how recommendations are influencing viewers' programming choices. "Recommendation engines are now recognized as an essential component for successful IPTV/OTT video services," Stefano Moscetti, Neptuny's head of business development for ContentWise, said in a prepared statement. "ContentWise has already demonstrated its ability to effectively support operators in providing a personalized TV experience and improve revenues. ContentWise 3.0 will constitute a step further, because it makes possible to analyze users' behavior while keeping into account operators' needs (i.e. applying business rules and marketing campaigns)."

In July (see the article published on itvt.com, July 21st), Neptuny announced that it had joined the Microsoft Mediaroom Application Developer Program, which is targeted at third-party developers that are building interactive TV applications that run on the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV platform.