Recommendation Ventures, the company behind social music and video recommendations service Scouta has signed a new deal with EPG provider IceTV to provide intuitive content recommendations to IceTV users.
The new service, IceTV Recommendations will be provided to IceTV users as part of the IceTV EPG service. The service allows users to receive personalized suggestions and an opportunity to discover and record new TV shows. Suggested TV shows are displayed as an IceTV Recommendation using a separate icon within the IceTV electronic program guide, allowing IceTV users to easily locate and then select them for more information. From there users can set the recommended TV show to remotely record onto their compatible digital
recording device at home within a few clicks.
We mentioned Scouta’s move into white label recommendation provision back in March. The company has had some success with its core Scouta TV offering, but now sees its core business opportunities going forward as a backend recommendation engine provider for other sites.
IceTV is another great example of the collective intelligence business model is by and far a success. You give the viewers want they want and when they want to make them happy. A happy user will return and this is exactly what IceTV is hoping for. It seems this company will become a hit.
Can I make a request; overview of evaluation of service from top commenters?
I am personally astounded that IceTV is even needed.
It is only because we have brain dead TV Networks that refuse to inject the EPG data into the DVB stream. This is why IceTV exists. What happens when the networks change their minds.
The networks in Australia have tried a few times to sue IceTV into non-existance.. as they see this as a way to let people use a DVR to record content and skip commercials.. Luckly common sense prevailed and the networks failed to stop IceTV. But still. If the Networks used the DVB-EPG stream as it is suppose to be, and transmitte 7 days in advance, IceTV subscription service for this simply RSS feed would disappear..
Sure adding social aspects to the data feed is interesting, however, its not integration with the existing systems that support the EPG feed.. (ie, Media Centre) And in the long run, due to all these issues, I do not see this as the future of adding social networking aspects to TV.
The living room experience needs to evolve more, and social applicatins will be implementred via applications like future versions of Microsoft Media centre. (And Microsoft will hope to control it and advertise via it.)
Interesting work IceTV, but shaky foundations.
James
It’s nice. Thanks for the post.
“It is only because we have brain dead TV Networks that refuse to inject the EPG data into the DVB stream. This is why IceTV exists. What happens when the networks change their minds.”
Please note that the DVB-T EPG stream won’t ever include the full spectrum of metadata required to make intelligent recording devices… you need stable series IDs and other flags to ensure series recording works properly.
Overseas there’s typically an aggregator that does this for the stations (working with the stations).
In Australia the stations didn’t want that, so IceTV went out on their own.
So a full EPG over broadcast will only help the current low end PVRs, not the new internet enabled ones.
It’s going to be an interesting few years.