What would you like to watch next? Video recommendation tech firm Jinni signs Ooyala, TELUS and Prisa

Tel Aviv, Israel-based semantic video discovery technology outfit Jinni has teamed up with Ooyala, a major video streaming, analytics and monetization company, and signed deals with TELUS and Prisa.
What would you like to watch next? Video recommendation tech firm Jinni signs Ooyala, TELUS and Prisa

Tel Aviv, Israel-based semantic video discovery technology outfit Jinni is today announcing a fairly big deal that was struck with American video streaming, analytics and monetization company Ooyala.

Ooyala, flush with $43 million in fresh funding, will integrate its machine-learning big data analytics systems with Jinni's semantic discovery to deliver what it deems a "new level of video personalization" for all screens.

The service will be available to media companies, broadcasters and pay TV operators across multiple regions, but not just yet: Ooyala and Jinni expect to have joint services in pre-release with select customers in the first half of 2014, with broader availability in the second half of this year.

In PR lingo, the joint service sounds something like this:

"Jinni and Ooyala will work together to develop and deploy a completely new level of machine learning powered by semantic discovery that will allow TV providers to tailor programming and video viewing experiences to each individual user at a very granular and powerful level; offerings such as personalized channels, custom programming guides, mood-based browsing and search, and viewer recommendations for both live and VoD content across vast catalogs of content.

All designed to provide users with easy, intuitive access to content of all types." And here are some 'conceptual mockups' (i.e. what it could end up looking like):

Mood-based recommendations

Personalized Discovery

Semantic Search 1

TV Recommendations

The reasons this is kind of a big deal for Jinni, is that Mountain View, California-based Ooyala now collects more than 2 billion events daily from hundreds of millions of consumers watching videos.

Ooyala, which counts the likes of ESPN, Bloomberg, NBC Universal, Telegraph Media Group and The Washingtong Post among its customers, can analyze all that data to detect trending content and help operators deliver more personalized viewing experience across screen types.

As Jinni co-founder and CEO Yosi Glick puts it:

“Bringing Ooyala’s big data infrastructure, collaborative filtering technology and real-time analytics together with our semantic recommendations, we’ll deliver the industry’s most compelling personalization platform for TV.”

Jinni marches on

Having followed Jinni for quite a few years now, I'm not surprised the company manages to score deals like this; I'm actually amazed they haven't yet been acquired, if only for its technology.

The Israeli company created what it dubs 'Entertainment Genome', which powers its cross-catalog search and taste and mood-based video recommendation technology.

Essentially, Entertainment Genome is Jinni's ongoing attempt to map more aspects of movies, TV shows and semi-professional videos than anyone has done before. It attempts to do so by going beyond your usual categorizations such as keywords and genres, and adding thousands more 'genes' that are assigned to each title to describe mood, style, plot, setting and much more.

Jinni provides content discovery and personalized recommendations to pay TV and OTT content providers such as Xfinity, Xbox, VUDU, Bouygues and SingTel.

New deals

Separately, the company is today announcing new business deals with Spanish CANAL+ /YOMVI network from local media conglomerate Prisa, and Canada's TELUS.

The partnership with Prisa is particularly notable, as it marks the first Spanish-language set-top box deployment of the (multi-lingual) Jinni solution. CANAL+ is the leading digital entertainment platform in Spain, encompassing a broad family of channels.

Jinni's platform has also been implemented on TELUS set-top-boxes for TV and movie content recommendations on Optik TV, the Canadian telecom company's IPTV-based television service.

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