TiVo: Execs urges personalisation is key to driving user engagement

TiVo execs has urged more needs to be done around creating a more personalised user experience for users via content recommendations and the overall UX interface. 

Lisette Preston-Barnes and Patrick Byrden (Source: Vod Professional)

In attendance today at the OTT Question Time event in London, Patrick Byrden, VP of business development and strategy at TiVo said, “everyone talks about personalisation, but actually implementing it is a different thing.”

“You can have personalised recommendations going horizontally (on the user interface). But, really the whole experience should be personal,” he explained. “So some people watch a lot of sports on TV, some people hate sports. So on the home screen, on the second rail, don’t recommend sports content to everybody. That makes no sense, right and it just frustrates people.”

Lisette Preston-Barnes, business development director for monetisation and data optimisation at TiVo, reiterated the company’s main priority is “content first, and the user experience-first” to see engagement and audience growth

She said, “Then eyeballs turns into impressions, and then marketers win because obviously they’re advertising in those right spaces.”

Byrden added content providers should “lean in more” with distributing content for free, giving the example of UK pay TV operator, Sky Sports showcasing its football highlights on YouTube.

“A couple years ago we would have thought that was insane, you’re giving away content for free, you know, effectively. But it’s been incredibly successful. And we find that the OTT we work with. Those who lean in more, who share data, who share, user behaviour data as well, they are the most successful ones when it comes to getting content to people.”

In August the Xperi TV technology signed a deal with TV manufacturer Sharp on the launch of Sharp smart TVs Powered by TiVo. Sharp’s new line of smart TVs integrated with TiVo’s operating system (OS) delivers consumers universal discovery of content across multiple sources powered by TiVo.

Commenting on the OS model, Byrden said “TiVo are not going to start building TVs. We’re not going to start making TVs. We did that with set-top-boxes many years ago and, we’ve learned from that.  But we just want to get people to the best content as quickly as possible.”