Marking its biggest win on the Ericsson Mediaroom platform and its largest pay-TV deal so far, Jinni said it has integrated its mood- and taste-driven video discovery engine with AT&T’s U-verse TV platform.
AT&T is using Jinni’s platform to help viewers discover content from its video-on-demand library, having implemented the feature about three weeks ago, “with more to come,” according to Jinni CEO Yosi Glick.
Jinni has developed a proprietary “Entertainment Genome” that uses individual tastes, moods and prior consumption patterns at the device level to create video recommendations. While some video discovery engines use individual profiles to present a list of recommended titles they might be interested in watching, sometimes separated by genre, Jinni claims that its semantic approach offers consumers the ability to “recognize their tastes” even without individual authentication, Glick said.
He said the new deal, which covers AT&T’s universe of 5.5 million U-verse TV subscribers, marks the largest pay-TV deployment so far for Tel Aviv, Israel-based Jinni.
Pay-TV providers are increasingly turning to personalized recommendation systems to help customers find content amid growing on-demand libraries and already-large lineup of live TV channels.
On the service provider front, Jinni also has deals with Comcast (for its budding X1 platform), Belgium’s Belgacom, Spain’s Prisa, Singapore’s SingTel and Canada’s Telus, which was Jinni's first deployment on Mediaroom, the IPTV platform that Ericsson acquired from Microsoft last fall.
Jinni is also providing video discovery capabilities on Xbox consoles and is in the process of being integrated with Vudu, Wallmart’s electronic sell-through service..
Jinni, which counts TiVo-owned Digitalsmiths and ThinkAnalytics among its competitors, is present on about 50 million devices, according to Glick.
Jinni, he said, charges a service fee on a per-subscriber basis. The company, founded in 2008, has raised $7.5 million and employs about 50 people.
