I recently caught up with Walt Horstman, SVP and GM of TiVo’s Advanced Media and Advertising business unit. TiVo, which was known for its DVRs, was acquired in the Fall of 2016 by data provider Rovi, and the combined company was renamed TiVo. It is pursuing an ambitious vision of using data to increase the value of relationships among viewers, content providers and advertisers. An edited transcript follows. 

VideoNuze: What is TiVo doing with advanced advertising?

Walt Horstman: There is a lot going on at TiVo in terms of advanced media and advertising and data.  I’m nearing on my one-year anniversary at the company, and we’ve been really heads down looking at the number of assets that we’ve got across the company, through a lot of acquisitions over the years, that we’ve now consolidated under this business unit, Advanced Media and Advertising, and it’s coming together very nicely with a very impressive set of capabilities. We really are focusing on two key objectives within the media ecosystem. We call these our two Virtual Cycles.

VideoNuze: Explain Virtual Cycle 1

WH: Virtual Cycle 1 is about driving loyalty and engagement between consumers and media companies. To accomplish that, we have a Personalized Content Discovery platform which offers recommendations around content and personalized search results for the consumer, as well as a conversation product which allows the user to use their voice to get to the content that they want, very easily and with high relevancy.

So, our offering is a series of software and data-driven applications to get consumers to the content that they are most interested in, in as seamless a way as possible, and, more importantly, we are making recommendations of what the consumer should watch next, to keep them in the video consumption world for longer. And, we’re finding that, with the right personalized recommendation or correct personalized search result, consumers will watch more programming than if they drop in and start hunting for a piece of content that is not personalized.

VideoNuze: Does all of this personalized recommendation and content discovery happen within the TiVo interface?

WH: No, there’s another sort of story here, which is that I like to say that TiVo is different from a lot of what people think TiVo is. And, that’s largely because TiVo today is now the merger of a company called Rovi and then TiVo, which everybody knows as kind of the originator of the DVR. These two companies came together, along with a number of acquisitions that each had made, and then re-branded to TiVo.

So, in the personalized content discovery world, we sell that, or provide that as a capability across the majority of cable service providers today in the U.S., as well as a number of service providers internationally. So, it is far beyond the TiVo device user experience. We are now powering personalized content discovery for 30 million households, domestically and internationally.

VideoNuze: Is there some specific type of set-top box that the viewer would need to have in order to receive these types of recommendations?

WH: No, the way that we’ve architected the offering, it can work across not only set-top boxes, it works across mobile distribution and digital distribution. In fact, it can support personalized content discovery far beyond the set-top box universe. One of our areas of focus is now working to provide this capability to content providers in their direct-to-consumer initiatives.

VideoNuze: How about virtual cycle 2?

WH: Virtual Cycle 2 is about the relationship between the media company and the advertisers and media agencies. This Virtual Cycle aims to increase advertising targeting and the value of advertising inventory using TV viewership data that we are collecting to create data products that allow agencies and advertisers to target their ads better and, consequently, allow media companies to better understand the value of their inventory through data-driven TV audience measurements. This also enhances the value of a lot of inventory that is not fully valued because the data has not been provided to understand the true audience for that inventory.

Just as we have the Personalized Content Discovery platform for the first Virtual Cycle, for the second Virtual Cycle we have a platform which we call Targeted Audience Delivery. It sits on a pool of set-top box viewership data that then delivers on that promise to both the media companies and the advertisers and agencies.

VideoNuze: How do the virtual cycles intersect with one another?

WH: So the common foundation that drives all of our capabilities is data, and it is really video consumption data, whether that be in an OTT, direct to consumer environment, or whether that’s on a set-top box and we’re looking at linear or time-shifted viewership. All of these offerings build on that foundation of data with their predictive algorithms.

We need to accurately predict what an individual consumer is going to be watching in the future, both to predict what we want to recommend for them, and also to predict – for advertising inventory purposes – what that consumer will also be watching, so that we can appropriately monetize the inventory for the media company. So, they work nicely together, making the consumer experience better by using data. It also drives better targeted advertising inventory for the media company and for the advertiser - so they really do reinforce each other end to end.

VideoNuze: It’s a bit cliché to say, but it does seem like data is going to be the key to everything going forward. Agree?

WH: Well, I think we’re just going to keep seeing more content fragmentation and audience dispersion. The notion of how we get to the content that we want in this extraordinary population of content is critically important. I kind of jokingly say that we’ve given the consumer all the content that they’ve ever wanted and all on demand, on any device and under any business model that you want, but now that we’ve done that, we’ve also make their lives incredibly confusing - because content is widely dispersed, it’s in different platforms, it’s under different economic models.

Our vision is that having a robust capability to help the consumer get to what they want, what is relevant for them - is critically important in this increasingly fragmented world. And, by the way, that’s important for the advertisers, because as we fragment the content smaller and smaller, the advertisers are having a harder time reaching the audience they want and -more importantly - understanding the reach and the frequency for which they need to target their messages in this highly fragmented world.  And the way that we’re going to solve that, and we’re in the middle of solving this, because it’s not solved - is by unifying the data between linear television, video on OTT, video on mobile, video on digital platforms - we’re going to have to unify all this through the underlying foundational data.

VideoNuze: Sounds like an expansive mission – good luck and thanks for your time.