Within four walls

Three steps to personalize the TV experience

In times of fierce competition between content owners, over-the-top-services and telecommunication providers, something must be done. Telecommunication providers around the global must reconsider the user experience they are currently offering.

TV as a service is facing fast pacing challenges, having competition surface from online media, local providers and user generated content, as well as new players. Customers now embrace a maze of options when buying and consuming, becoming indecisive individuals during their own shopping experience. In this new world of never ending options, the ability to cope with this model has become more complex.

Telecommunication providers are facing serious competition from Content Owners and over-the-top services. Competitors, whose services rely on the connectivity built by telecommunication providers themselves, are now occupying the space once dominated by Telcos.

Today, content is directly exposed to subscribers. This exposure makes customer retainment difficult and questionable, as it is no longer exclusively driven by platform and contents. Content is aggregate, but perceived as extremely fragmented with a considerable gap between value and value perception.

When attempting to elevate the value of content, the solution must come from concepts such as content aggregation, curation and personalization. Concepts that will calculate viewer habits, join together similar topics, and recommend content according to individual preferences.

When adding all these variables together, it is clear that content and platforms can be mere clones, from one telecommunication provider to the other. However, intangible factors, such as User Experience, become difficult to replicate.

Creating User Experience by properly structuring content and using specific user journeys tweaked with context awareness will provide telecommunication providers around the globe a with more consistent and unique experience.

To move towards a more consistent User Experience, Telcos must follow 3 essential steps.

Secure customer usage date

It is important to ensure that customer usage is captured and retained. Doing so will permit structured architecture and customer usage exposure into systems. Once the storage location is secured, context must be selected from User Interface functional areas, in order to produce relevant KPIs. To be effective, data collection must start early on and be able to create necessary history and relevant statistics.

Select and Deploy Recommendation Engine

A recommendation engine, once deployed, requires large amounts of data on customer usage context. Part of the success of content consumption relies on time and personalised recommendations. Once this amount of information is captured and stored, a big data tooling to process will permit a complete analysis.

Start slow, grow steady

Once a recommendation engine is in place, taking action is important. However, building up content curation, recommending user journey and editorial lines must start slowly. Bringing customers in on this revolutionary experience must start from the beginning and work its way up. It is very important to never lose control of why customers are choosing content. It’s a learning process for both customers and providers.

The structure and sequence of content and platform must be combined to commence the transformation process in TV services.

This is the future of television about to undergo a major revolution.

And in moments of great changes, it is fascinating to look back at how it all started.
See how it all started in 1945.