Digitalsmiths has announced deals this morning to power personalized video search and discovery across all platforms for Time Warner Cable, and for i.TV, the TV guide app for iPhone/iPad, Nintento Wii U, AOL, Huffington Post and others.
Ben Weinberger, Digitalsmiths CEO, also told me this morning that the company's "Seamless Discovery" technology is now powering over 1 billion transactions per month, which consist of user requests for search, recommendations and other data. At this level, Ben believes Digitalsmiths is now the largest provider of search and recommendations in North America, its main geographic customer area.
In the case of Time Warner Cable, Ben said that Digitalsmiths has been working with company for the past year, primarily putting foundational metadata in place, which is tapped for search and recommendations. TWC's first implementation of Digitalsmiths is happening for subscribers using tablets to access TWC TV, the company's connected TV augment. The longer-term intent is to have common search/discovery in for set-top boxes and other devices through which TWC TV is available (earlier this week Roku announced a deal to deliver TWC TV as well).
Ben explained that Digitalsmiths is helping move TWC beyond typical electronic programming guide grid formats. Each resident in a household can have their own personalized results, with profiles carried over from one device to the next. The TWC deal is completely white label, with no Digitalsmiths branding. Conversely, the i.TV deal will provide some branding to Digitalsmiths as part of forthcoming Nintendo TVii guide experience. i.TV says that 15 million people/month use it as their guide.
(Note: Digitalsmiths is a VideoNuze sponsor)
Categories: Cable TV Operators, Technology, Video Search
Topics: Digitalsmiths, i.TV, Time Warner Cable