3SS, Media Distillery and XroadMedia create end-to-end AI-led solution enabling linear-on-demand for Android TV

What is Linear-on-Demand?

Linear-on-Demand (LoD) is a next-generation paradigm for video, enabling demonstrably personalized, unified digital entertainment. LoD powerfully collects and curates video assets from a diverse range of sources and assembles them in a 100% personalized linear experience.

3SS introduced Linear-on-Demand as a concept and prediction for the future of TV at the launch of its ground-breaking 3READY Front End and UI/UX solution at IBC 2016.

LoD breaks down the barriers between previously disjointed content silos, delivering a unified immersive viewing experience across content types and sources – live TV, library, on-demand, catch-up, apps and web.

Truly personalized TV can only be achieved with granular user profiles and accurate content metadata. Assuring the quality of existing metadata is one of the key challenges for operators to position relevant, concisely aligned content for subscribers. With this new joint platform, multiple layers of high-quality metadata are made available in real time to help viewers find their desired content, thereby promoting viewer engagement.

“In today’s highly competitive marketplace, service providers need to differentiate from their rivals. Also, they need to increase stickiness of their service. Better personalization and simplified, more successful content discovery are the answers to the need for increased viewer enjoyment and loyalty,” commented Kai-Christian Borchers, 3SS Managing Director.

At the heart of this three-pillar solution is an exceptional depth of profiling, while delivering a granular understanding of what comprises an item of video content. With this new platform, the TV service can really understand what the viewer spends time watching – and the key is rich metadata. The joint solution is driven by leading-edge AI and ML, advanced data harvesting and processing, interconnected with 3SS’ adaptive, intuitive award-winning user experience, enabled by 3READY.

Media Distillery uses a wide combination of Machine Learning methodologies to recognize every visual and audial aspect inside video, including face, speech, object, logo and text. This deep content understanding and indexing of what actually makes up an item of video content enables user searches that yield highly diverse and accurate results.

Via the new combined solution and Linear-on-Demand, flexible personal channels can be created based on what XroadMedia’s content discovery and personalization solution learns from users’ selection patterns and history. It combines programs and clips from multiple content sources, including OTT services, with those featured on mainstream and premium entertainment channels, all presented as integrated, highly attractive and navigable linear playlists.

3READY displays it all in a harmonious unified interface that excites the subscriber with a content menu of unprecedented richness and depth. Furthermore, with enhanced voice control enabled by 3READY Assistant, viewers can create personal linear channels based on favorite topics and genres and which can continue learning more about viewers’ interests through conversational interaction.

The knowledge of what’s inside the content combines with the ability to capture and interpret viewer actions and preferences, with natural voice search for the user. The resultant deep, detailed, accurate searching is generations beyond what’s possible with traditional EPG, metadata and UIs. Enhanced voice search plus rich metadata gives operators a powerful set of capabilities which transforms the searching act, yielding superior customer experiences and monetization possibilities.

The trio believe that creating seamless, personalized and measurable experiences, with content from all sources and ads that are relevant to the user, is the best-possible revenue generation opportunity for the service provider.

By embracing Linear-on-Demand, the operator who has chosen to base its next-gen TV service on Android TV Operator Tier has the opportunity to maximize revenues, while return on technology investment and overall cost of ownership are optimized through end-to-end cloud-native technology.

Says Roland Sars, CEO of Media Distillery: “It’s time for TV service providers to deconstruct and re-sequence their content, to serve up right-size, on-topic personal experiences.”

“From smarter search to snackable content and richer profiles, the players who differentiate through their content metadata, and enable individualized, intuitive viewing, will captivate and stay relevant for expectant audiences,” he added.

“Through our three-way collaboration, we now have the capability to offer service providers a ‘boxed’ pre-integrated solution to personalize the user experience with fully articulated AI mechanisms in the back end and the front end which brings it all to life, with highest-possible optimization,” 

summarizes Tom Dvorak, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at XroadMedia.

“At 3SS, Linear-on-Demand is a dream we’ve been pursuing since we founded the company back in 2009. With the combination of industry-leading technologies and customer experiences from 3SS, Media Distillery and XroadMedia, the building blocks to enable Linear-on-Demand are now in place,” Borchers added.

“This has only been possible by teaming up with partners who share the same vision about the future of TV. We look forward to demonstrating how this best-in-class platform solves today’s content discovery challenges caused by increasing OTT service fragmentation and creates the entertainment experiences that viewers really desire,” 

said Borchers.