The TV consumer experience must provide users with more personalisation while allowing the provider editorial control as well as working seamlessly over a variety of devices. That’s according to a panel of leading providers who discussed the subject during the ‘Find Me Something Good’ session at IBC2017.
BT’s next-gen interface has gone down the curated route and claims “to deliver a personalised experience on every screen”, according to head of BT solutions architecture, Brendan Hole. He added that giving customers features such as the ability to curate a place for all their favourite content involved “a huge change in architecture” in the data model behind its platform.
Fellow panellist Android TV’s head of product and strategy Sasha Prueter added that for Google, the challenges presented by personalisation were largely commercial.
“It’s a major challenge for the UX: how do you keep your customers within your environment because yes there’s a lot of content choice, but if you want to sell services to your clients you want your content to be in the centre – so how do you balance that with a good experience?”
According to Ashley Grossman, senior manger of video discoverability at Liberty Global, there are three pillars emerging in the next generation of its platform Horizon TV, which he described as ‘slick, fast and simple’.
“There’s more content and it needs to be packaged and discovered in a compelling way; the interface is faster and it has been developed in a more dynamic way,” he said.
