Charter Communications has begun rolling out personalized video search and recommendations to its 5 million subscribers, using Digitalsmiths' Seamless Discovery Platform. Billy Purser, VP of Marketing at Digitalsmiths told me that Charter actually began introducing this to its web and Charter TV mobile app users over the past 3 months and has now started rolling it out to subscribers with IP set-top boxes.

The Digitalsmiths search and recommendations are based on the company's Unified Data Service, which structures numerous individual data services (e.g. TMS, Rovi, Thuuz, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Common Sense Media, etc.). This data is then paired with both implicit (e.g. viewer behavior) and explicit (e.g. viewer ratings).

The results drive recommendations and also personalized search, which is an ordering of results based on what the Digitalsmiths' system thinks the viewer would prefer (e.g. a specific Tom Cruise movie). Digitalsmiths can present choices from linear TV, premium channels, VOD and OTT. Charter is also Digitalsmiths Sports Discovery, which surfaces specific sporting events and can even do alerts when games go into overtime or a huge upset is underway.

Personalized search and recommendations are strategic priority for pay-TV operators as they seek to deliver more value for their increasingly expensive bundles and fend off competition from cheaper OTT alternatives. Just last week Nielsen research showed that viewers typically only watch about 17 different TV channels on a regular basis. Digitalsmiths own recent research found that over 80% of viewers watch 10 or fewer channels.

All of this creates a "more is less" problem for operators as subscribers perceive they're paying for a lot of stuff they never watch, diluting the overall value. The issue has grown more acute as OTT services' purely on-demand model allows viewers to pick and choose exactly what they want to watch at any given time.

Digitalsmiths was acquired by TiVo in January.