Taming the Many-Headed Problem of Video Content Discovery

Let’s face it: The OTT landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. The promise was that consumers could create skinny bundles of content they wanted (from across providers) in order to replace endless channels in a traditional cable operator’s electronic programming guide (EPG). 现实已经变成了一个孤立的怪物, as brands split off from aggregator services (like Hulu and Netflix; remember, Hulu was formed by Fox and Comcast) into their own direct-to-consumer offerings. It seems there’s an announcement of a new OTT offering every day. If consumers want shows from all of them, they must now have a multitude of OTT subscriptions.

The underlying issue to this isn’t the fragmentation itself, though. It’s that consumers see all of their OTT services as a single “TV experience.“在EPG的陪伴下长大(到目前为止，我自己也是如此)， 电视指南), consumers want to access all their content in one interface, regardless of its location. 值得庆幸的是, 部分OTT平台, 比如Xfinity和Liberty Global, are busy integrating providers like Netflix into their programming guides so that viewers don’t have to fumble around with a bunch of apps. (哦，对了，他们用的是哪个应用? 智能电视上的那个, 或者在Apple TV上, 或者Roku怎么样, 别忘了亚马逊Fire TV Stick...). 其他创新公司，比如 Caavo, are attempting to solve the problem in different ways—by acting as a proxy to all of a viewer’s subscriptions and aggregating the content into a single view. (苹果也有类似的做法.)

但这只能部分解决问题, because viewers are still left with considerable angst about what content is on what provider and, 更重要的是, 他们可能会喜欢看什么内容. As OTT providers have incorporated recommendation technologies into their user experience, 消费者已经习惯了它们. 回到一个沉闷的想法, old EPG offered by the cable provider that doesn’t supply any sort of recommendation seems barbaric. But how can viewers get recommendations across all their services? 简短的回答是，他们不能.

第一个原因是后勤问题. 这些OTT提供商都非常孤立. They don’t want to share 信息 with providers they see as their competitors. Why would they want the viewer to get recommendations for content that’s in a rival’s service (even if the consumer doesn’t see it as a rival)? These services have become walled gardens despite the open web technologies on which they are often built. I can guarantee you that most of them have RESTful APIs, 能输出JSON或XML吗, 并且有一个他们可以共享的元数据格式.

这就是第二个问题:元数据. 不幸的是, most OTT providers and video distributors roll their own metadata framework that describes their video assets. Organizations like MovieLabs and EIDR have implemented ways to hook together video content data sources (the MovieLabs ontology is particularly interesting), 但这并不能解决元数据问题. 有, 简单地说, no standard way for the streaming video industry to describe and represent a video asset programmatically. And that creates a major problem for content recommendation and discovery. 如果没有服务“使用相同的语言”,” it becomes very hard to recommend content to the viewer, 更不用说跨服务搜索了.

为了统一这种新的电视体验, the industry must come together and agree on a standard data structure to describe content. 然后, OTT services must be willing to open their gates so that description data can be shared and consumed elsewhere. 到处都是. The thing they fear right now could be their greatest asset: Instead of worrying about recommending content on a rival’s platform, perhaps they should look at the opportunity for viewers to be recommended content that’s on their service? 显然，这是双向的.

[本文发表于2019年7月/ 8月号。 流媒体杂志 内容发现的日益严重的问题."]