Vionlabs to debut game-changing AI-powered Content Discovery Platform

Vionlabs announces that its game-changing AI-powered Content Discovery Platform will make its public debut at IBC2019. The platform enables operators to cutdown the time consumers spend looking for content, reduce churn and improve key business metrics.

Stockholm, Sweden(12 Aug 2019)

Vionlabs announces that its game-changing AI-powered Content Discovery Platform will make its public debut at IBC2019. The platform enables operators to cutdown the time consumers spend looking for content, reduce churn and improve key business metrics. It also gives operators the power to make the most of their video catalogs, by unearthing otherwise undiscovered links between viewers and content, and to simplify UX, making grid-like interfaces a back-up rather than the primary discovery mechanism.

“Viewers are spending 25% or more of screen-time looking for something to watch. Solving this issue is our major focus at Vionlabs and early customer engagement has shown that our AI-powered content analysis approach delivers game-changing results,” says Marcus Bergström, CEO, Vionlabs.

“Our solution is based on deep thinking from our engineers and their key realization that we could train AI engines to learn what variables should be measured in the video and audio and combine this with viewers’ watch history to significantly out-perform existing content discovery solutions. Our platform is now providing live content discovery that improves critical operator metrics such as VOD buy-rates and customer engagement and we’re excited to make our public debut at IBC2019,” concluded Bergström.

At deployment, Vionlabs measures everything in the videos in an operator’s catalog and trains its AI engines to work out what matters in each asset. The platform uses AI and deep learning and combines this video analysis with a viewer’s detailed watch history to provide industry leading content discovery services to operators through a cloud-based SaaS model. The platform is designed for linear TV, catch-up, streaming and all flavours of VoD.

“During the year we have productized our technology and deployed our content discovery platform for operators that are now enjoying a significant uplift in VOD buy-rates and engagement,” says Giles Wilson, CTO, Vionlabs. “By serving up the right content at the right time, our content discovery platform maximizes the time viewers spend watching the content they love and minimizes the time they spend searching for it. Leading to happier viewers that spend more time and money on a video platform.”

The Vionlabs difference

Viewers are spending 25% or more of screen-time looking for something to watch. Vionlabs knew that this was a serious issue that could be improved. Vionlabs believes that the primary reason other discovery methods don’t perform well is that they do not analyze video assets, they’re instead relying on external metadata sources for information on the video content in an operators catalog. It’s Vionlabs fundamental belief that metadata sources are simply not nuanced enough to provide a basis for accurate content discovery services.

The Vionlabs content discovery platform analyzes each video in great detail and combine this with the viewer’s watch-history. The platform doesn’t need to know anything more about the consumer and it doesn’t try to guess who the viewer is. All that matters is the content they watch, for how long and how often.

Vionlabs has trained multiple AI engines to measure everything in the video, including object recognition using computer vision as well as colours, pace, audio, and many many more variables to produce a fingerprint timeline throughout the content.

The AI engine learns what matters and how changes in these fingerprint timelines are connected to what content individual viewers enjoy. Knowing similarities between content is vital, but it’s not enough on its own. Vionlabs has also trained an AI engine to analyze a viewer’s watch-history. Finally, it has an AI engine that takes the outputs of the other AI engines to provide the most accurate content discovery platform. 

The content discovery results produced by the Vionlabs platform are made available through a cloud-based SaaS model integrated with the operators back office systems. The Vionlabs platform is already deployed and is generating very significant uplifts in VOD buy-rates and viewer engagement for its operator customers.