Digitalsmiths said this morning that its Seamless Discovery Platform has been chosen by 7 of the top 10 U.S. pay-TV operators, which cover 64% of the country's subscribers. Globally the company is powering discovery for over 100 million homes through 46 customers and partners. Most recently Digitalsmiths announced Australia's Foxtel as its latest big customer.

The company's Seamless Discovery Platform supports search, recommendations and browsing for set-top boxes, smart TVs, mobile devices and desktops. Digitalsmiths has long differentiated itself through metadata, and over the summer introduced its Unified Data Service, which indexes all of Digitalsmiths' scene-level, time-based metadata, with a pay-TV operator's VOD and linear schedule plus 3rd-party sources like social networks, critics' ratings and video trailers.

Improved search is critical for pay-TV operators to compete better with growing OTT options. Digitalsmiths has found that whereas half of pay-TV subscribers use some type of OTT service, just 22% of them order at least 1 VOD movie per month. Almost 2/3 of subscribers said they don't even use their pay-TV operator's VOD search function with over half saying they would if it were easier. Clearly there is a lot of ground for operators to make up in search.