Tag: personalization

Basics of Streaming explains how services use behavioral, billing, content, and playback signals to predict subscriber churn. The business value comes from identifying why someone’s likely to leave, choosing the right intervention, and proving that action creates incremental customer value.

Disney+ is testing natural-language and voice search that turns a viewer’s immediate intent into customized content recommendations, while ESPN is using a related tool to connect sports questions with programming and other products. Disney can use those queries as a…

Basics of Streaming explains how metadata gives video assets the identity, rights, technical instructions, and commercial context needed for distribution, discovery, advertising, and revenue tracking. Strong metadata infrastructure helps streaming companies launch content faster, automate workflows, improve recommendations, protect against…

HBO Max's testing Shorts and Ask HBO Max to help mobile viewers discover programming through personalized video clips and natural-language searches. The features could reduce time-to-play, increase title starts and saves, and give WBD stronger data on viewer intent.

Gracenote’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Jamendo’s case against Nvidia have exposed the growing value of structured media metadata as AI companies seek reliable information about content, rights, availability, and relationships. Streaming companies that control clean catalog data can reduce operational…

From the Archives revisits how Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Also Bought” feature helped turn recommendation engines into core internet infrastructure. Amazon’s item-to-item collaborative filtering showed that behavior could outperform metadata, creating a discovery model that now powers streaming, music,…

From the Archives revisits TiVo Suggestions, one of TV’s earliest recommendation engines and a preview of how discovery would become core to streaming. TiVo used viewing behavior and feedback to predict what users might like, proving that understanding taste could…

Skip explains why many companies are using AI as a cost-cutting tool first and a product improvement tool second. AI can absolutely improve discovery, support, personalization, workflows, and media operations, but too many companies are pointing it at headcount reduction…

From the Archives revisits Netflix's $1 million Netflix Prize competition, which challenged researchers to improve its recommendation algorithm and helped accelerate breakthroughs in machine learning and personalization. The contest reinforced a principle that still shapes streaming today: helping users discover…

Basics of Streaming explains how AI's becoming a foundational intelligence layer across the streaming ecosystem, influencing everything from recommendations and search to encoding, advertising, moderation, and churn prediction. The piece argues that competitive advantage in streaming increasingly depends on how…