Please contact The Filter today via email info AT thefilter.com or call +44 (0)1225 475825 to arrange a meeting.

“Advanced content recommendation solution to deliver intelligent content 

London, 19 February 2013: Saffron Digital has partnered with The Filter, a global leader in personalization, to create the industry’s most advanced end to end premium video solution with highly intelligent personalised content discovery and recommendation functionality.

The new partnership will enable device manufacturers, carriers, mobile networks, broadcasters, retailers and other content owners to quickly and cost-effectively launch highly personalised and engaging digital entertainment experiences that open up profitable revenue streams, reduce churn, drive user engagement and increase consumer loyalty.

The Filter’s advanced personalization technology will integrate seamlessly with Saffron Digital’s secure online video platform and services to create a pre-integrated recommendation solution that will intelligently generate relevant and timely movie and TV recommendations. Using a blend of historic viewing habits, content metadata and contextual data points like the time of the day, device type and location, it will generate personalised features which can include mychannel, more-like-this, also-watched, recommended-for-me, browse and more from. All presented in an order most relevant to the tastes and behaviours of the individual subscriber.

“The portfolio of premium content we make available to our customers is growing all the time so it’s vital that subscribers are able to quickly and easily sort through that breadth of content and bring to the surface the films and TV shows that are most relevant and appealing to them,” said Jason Keane, CEO Saffron Digital. “By integrating with The Filter we’re enabling exactly that. Our customers can offer each subscriber a unique and personalised experience tailored exactly to their tastes. Our customers can then leverage the power of that personalisation to engage more effectively with subscribers, market to them more efficiently and ultimately enrich the viewing experience. The Filter is the best recommendation technology we could find in the market today so with it powering our content recommendation and discovery we can continue to offer the most advanced premium video solutions.”

The Filter’s sophisticated solution combines a wide array of statistical and rule based analysis combined with advanced artificial intelligence techniques that learn about taste and context. It also provides valuable insight into UI performance, trends and user behaviour including churn prediction, and inputs for trigger marketing to support personalised email campaigns and newsletters.

“We are very excited about this partnership as it makes it really easy and cost effective for the content service providers, telcos and mobile operators to deliver compelling and innovative personalised video and TV services to their subscribers”, said Rhett Ryder CEO and Co-Founder, The Filter. “Pre-integrating two leading platforms reduces risk and enables us to jointly optimise the end to end solution for the benefit of our customers and their subscribers. The Filter taste profiles provided in this relationship can also be extended to support other media type recommendations and services to form a solid foundation for a wider entertainment offering as the service’s success grows. It’s good to see that there is a real cultural synergy between Saffron and The Filter in terms of the ethos and passion we share in delivering the best technology and service to help our customers succeed.”

Saffron Digital and The Filter will be on hand at Mobile World Congress from 25-28 March 2013 to discuss the partnership. To arrange a meeting with The Filter at MWC please contact us; ‘info AT thefilter.com’.

About Saffron Digital

Founded in 2006, Saffron Digital creates innovative multiscreen film and TV services that enable device manufacturers, carriers, broadcasters, studios and retailers to increase revenue and build viewer engagement. Using its secure online video platform, Saffron Digital combines content preparation, content management, storefront design, flexible payment and a secure player to give subscribers a compelling video experience across any or all devices.

Saffron Digital simplifies the management and delivery of a premium video service. Its modular platform enables operators to integrate individual components into their existing systems and workflows or it can deliver a completely end to end solution that includes content preparation, a content management system, application and storefront development and a secure video player. Saffron Digital has been running cloud based locker and DRM domain services since 2009 and the latest platform is UV ready out of the box.

With offices in Europe, Asia and the US, Saffron Digital powers end-to-end premium video solutions on a global scale for clients including: KDDI, Sky and HTC. It has received international recognition for its work and has won multiple awards including: The Mobile Entertainment Award for Best Video and TV Service Provider (2009, 2010, and 2011); Guardian Top 100 Tech Media Invest Companies in the UK; MEFFYS 2011 Best TV & Video Service and the Media Momentum Award 2010, 2011.

About The Filter

The Filter was founded in Bath, UK in 2005 to build global subscriber taste profiles that use relevant subscriber and consumption data to deliver the best personalised entertainment content discovery and recommendations, in the context of media type, device, time, language and business objectives. This means for example that video and TV recommendations can support a subscribers entertainment journey through their day to make sure they quickly find the content they want to consume, whether they are on a smartphone, tablet or with their family on a smart TV. The recommendations are optimised to meet the business objectives of the service provider balanced with the goal of presenting the most relevant content to their subscribers to increase engagement, consumption and enjoyment, thus increasing revenues and reducing churn. The Filter’s Global Subscriber Taste Profile approach also delivers an innovative and more pragmatic solution to the big data problem for Tier 1 Service Providers, Telcos and Mobile Operators.

The Filter’s investors include rock legend and digital pioneer Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures. Some of the customers taking advantage of The Filter taste profiles include France Telecom/Orange, BT, Nokia and Vudu (Walmart).

How Choosing What to Watch on TV is Smarter and Easier Than Ever Before

Finding what to watch on television is more relevant than ever thanks to BT Vision’s on demand service powered by The Filter.  The Filter, a global leader in personalised content discovery and recommendation solutions, is powering BT Vision’s recommendations and User Interface, ensuring a smarter and easier way for their customers to discover and find content that they will love.

 “With BT Vision’s rapidly growing video-on-demand library of great film and TV content, BT Vision wanted to make it easy for their customers to discover the breadth and depth of choice – surfacing content that is relevant to their household taste,” said Rhett Ryder, CEO of The Filter. “BT Vision’s use of The Filter’s advanced personalisation technology, combined with a personalised User Interface, is allowing BT Vision to provide a smarter and easier way for customers to discover and find content. In my opinion, with this approach and our technology platform, they are leading the way in terms of home entertainment experiences.”

The Filter’s solution offers BT Vision subscribers a unique and highly personalised video-on-demand experience, generating targeted and timely recommendations using a blend of historic viewing habits, content metadata and contextual data points, like the time of the day and the day of the week. This advanced and granular approach to content recommendation only comes with the latest version of  BT Vision video-on-demand service.

BT Vision is using this smart technology not only to recommend content but also to power the navigation of their system – pushing to the front content that is most likely to be of interest to that household, catering for different viewing habits at different times of day.

“The Filter’s solution facilitates an enjoyable discovery experience for our customers, that aims to maximize the value our customers can get from their subscription,” said Kate Dean, Director of Programming and Content, BT Vision. “They are a truly smart company who bring a sophisticated intelligence to the retailing of Programming.  Their expertise and collaborative way of working has been invaluable.”

The Filter’s sophisticated solution enable digital entertainment services to increase engagement and customer satisfaction, using a wide array of statistical and rule based analysis, combined with advanced artificial intelligence techniques that learn about taste and context. The solution also provides valuable insight into UI performance, trends and behaviour of the users including churn prediction.

A Filter employee peruses a few apps over a bagel

October 2012 welcomed the anticipated release of Optimus Telecommunications Mobile App discovery service ‘Optimus TopApps’ – the latest mobile application to be powered by The Filter’s Personalisation engine.

Primed by The Filter, with UI developed by Compsoft, a leading provider of mobile app developer services, the TopApps discovery service fills a gap in the market, created by the partisannature of the native iOS and Android app stores. TopApps does this by providing a new way to discover apps through editorial, community and personalised recommendations tailored to the specific taste of Portuguese users. In addition, one of the key features that Optimus brings is the concept of an ‘AppList’, (a playlist for apps); allowing users to contribute and curate their own AppLists, plus the ability to share recommendations of apps to friends across different platforms and devices.

The AppList has been very well received by early adopters of the service. The Filter has also seen that the personalised ‘Apps For Me’ section on the Homepage is enticing a steady 20% of viewers to click through to download from the Google or iTunes stores.

The TopApps project is part of The Filter’s continued partnership with the Orange France Telecom Anticipation team based in Bristol and London in the UK, and at their Technocentre in Paris. The Filter has also provided solutions for a trial Orange ‘Concierge’ app which built an innovative device taste profile to power personalised, contextual recommendations for Songkick Gigs, Allocine Cinema Listings, Dailymotion Music Videos and Deezer Songs. The Filter did this by analysing the user’s device taste, social taste and by filtering content based on the users location and by the time of day and week.

For Optimus TopApps, The Filter has utilised their extensive experience in media catalogues to collect the App store metadata data required to power the service. The Filter has also extended their products to include an advanced Free Text Search capability which is used to support TopApps search.

As reported by 4-traders.com; The launch of TopApps in Portugal is part of a project being run by the Orange group, Optimus being the first operator of the group to provide the application. According to Nuno Lopes Gama, mobile Internet and multimedia services manager at Optimus, “being the pioneering country in the launch of TopApps is recognition of Optimus’ leadership in strategically focusing on multimedia services in Portugal, and will help to collect important information and lessons to develop and improve the application for its launch in other markets”.

“It’s the most wonderfu

While for a lot of us this would describe Christmas in a roasted chest-nutshell, try replacing the word wonderful with stressful and the nutshell still holds true for the majority, with perhaps the most stressful item of the festive to-do list being the daunting task of gift buying.

If only there was a way of being recommended gifts to buy for others without the recommendation engine knowing anything about them. How could this ever be possible you may ask? The answer to this is, what if we give gifts not based on the receiver but rather based on our own tastes and perceptions of ourselves? 

This is a psychological theory that has been suggested and the implications, were this to be true, would suggest that we can be recommended a gift to buy for someone else based on our own taste profile and consumer behaviour.

Think back to a gift that you gave last Christmas or, for a Birthday… What was your thought process behind the decision? The finer details would need to be ironed out such as gender differences or age differences but the concept itself goes someway to lifting the proverbial weight off my shoulders.

Or, perhaps we need to consider all the personal data out there that big corporates use to target us? If we all shared that data with each other then our friends and family could buy for us much more accurately. They might know what we’d been shopping for online (yes, I’d love that Rough Guide to Turkey to help me choose my holiday) and they might then know what we’ve already got, or even what we’ve just been selling (hmm, I obviously didn’t like the jumper my Gran got me last Christmas..)!

Perhaps this is not so much ‘the gift of good taste’, but more so ‘the gift of my taste’.

Information asymmetry occurs when one party (often a seller or provider) is in possession of more information than the other (often the consumer). It is sometimes suggested that this could be associated with recommendations in the sense that, the recommendation provider may know why the consumer is being recommended something while the consumer is oblivious as to the reasoning behind it. Could this be The Recommendations Market for Lemons?
A Lemon is an American slang term for a car that is found to be defective only after it has been bought, which may be due to asymmetric information. For this purpose let’s say that a lemon is something that has been recommended and found not to live up to its endorsement.
To reduce the risk of becoming a market for lemons, it could be argued that, if a recommendation were to be returned along with a reason as to why, we may be more sympathetic towards the discovery of a ‘lemon’ and less wary of the ‘Because I said so’ approach.
On the other hand, perhaps we should just trust those providing us with personalised and relevant ideas and of course the “glass half full” amongst us would say, if recommendations throw us lemons, make lemonade.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/internet-yelp-digg-technology-recommendations.html

We’re looking for a talented individual who lives and breathes planning and organisation and loves to deliver excellent customer service. You will have natural people skills, a positive attitude and the ability to remain calm and measured under pressure. You will be working closely with the Project Delivery Manager on a number of projects but will quickly be responsible for your own projects. As the Junior Project Manager you will be liaising directly with Customers and The Filter Engineering team to ensure that all projects and services are delivered in a timely manner and to a high standard.

November has been a busy month, as The Filter was invited to take part in two of the world’s most important events in Technology and Media.

At the invitation-only Monaco Media Forum, Rhett Ryder, The Filter’s COO, participated in a 60-minute panel moderated by Beet.tv founder Andy Plesser, and CEO David Maher-Roberts went to the New York City edition of Digital Hollywood to discuss Personalization with other major industry players.

On November 17^th, David joined executives from companies such as Pandora, Intel and Ogilvy in a panel that dealt with the social experience of personalized communication, and the issues that this brings up in relation to privacy. Can you – the panel asked – have true personalization without invading privacy, could privacy rules then mean the death of personalization, and are these features better with or without social inputs?

“It was definitely one of the best panels on the subject that I’ve ever taken part in,” says Maher-Roberts, who is often invited to speak at major conferences in the US and Europe.

The commercial aspects of personalization were also explored, as panellists debated whether personalization would eventually harm or even wipe out big brand advertising in a world where people are only shown the ads that are relevant to them. Could this be a positive development that led companies to use their resources in developing better products rather than marketing them?

Matt Goddard, CEO of Digital Marketing and Technology company R2integrated, certainly believes so, going as far as saying that “personalization will mean the death of big-budget TV shows and movies.”

The personalization theme was also very popular at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum, which was hosted by Prince Albert of Monaco from the 9^th to the 11^th November. COO Rhett Ryder represented The Filter in a discussion about online video and the ways in which consumer engagement, consumption and dwell time can be increased through building a personalized taste profile for users.

Click here to watch a video of the discussion, which is now available for a global audience.

As 2011 winds down and The Filter secures many important new clients and partnerships, we’re looking forward to bringing relevant, timely content to a lot more users in 2012!

We just moved into our new office in San Francisco. It’s on the corner of York and 19th in The Mission – next to some of my favourite coffee shops (Coffee Bar, Atlas) and eateries (Blowfish, Slow Club, Flour & Water, Bar Bambino). We are based on the ground floor of the building in the picture – it used to be a felt factory. Inside it is all red brick, wood beams and white boards. We are loving it already.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

31/10/2011 20:30 GMT

Australian public broadcaster SBS partners with The Filter to provide recommendations for its recently launched Video on Demand service.

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) launched SBS On Demand in September, providing a free video service with full episodes, films, clips and live streaming. The service features over 90 per cent of SBS’s current prime time content and features social media share buttons, 1.5 Mb streaming rates and recommendations powered by UK-based company The Filter.

The Filter is a world leader in providing highly relevant search, navigation and discovery solutions for digital entertainment content, and SBS intend to use the technology to provide its users with recommendations that will become highly personalized over time and will help them find what they are most likely to want to watch next.

“SBS ON DEMAND has been developed as more than just a regular catch-up service,” said Marshall Heald [Manager, Digital Media, SBS]. “It’s a real step forward in evolution – a sophisticated yet simple-to-use, true on-demand service providing our audiences with a more personal and flexible service – wherever and whenever they want.”

“We are really delighted to be helping SBS provide a more personal service to its audience,” said David Maher Roberts, The Filter’s CEO. Our experience working on projects for customers like NBC, Warner Bros. and Vudu will enable us to deliver personalized recommendations for SBS.

“This exciting partnership is our first client in Australasia and complements our global footprint with The Filter services being used in over 35 countries.”

About SBS

SBS is Australia’s multicultural and multilingual national public broadcaster. SBS delivers a comprehensive range of media services across television, radio and online in-language and in English.

http://www.sbs.com.au/

About The Filter

The Filter is a world leader in recommendation services for digital media content, delivering over one billion recommendations to more than 150 million unique users every month. The Filter uses the data produced by consumers’ interaction to deliver the most relevant content back as recommendations. Founded in 2004 and backed by Peter Gabriel and Eden Ventures, The Filter is based in the UK with offices in New York and California. The Filter provides Software as a Service recommendation and personalization solutions across all digital platforms including video, films, TV and music.  The Filter’s clients include Dailymotion, Walmart’s Vudu, Nokia, NBC.com , Fuhu and Warner Bros. For more information please visit http://www.thefilter.com

Press Contact

Alice Bonasio

Marketing & PR Executive

Intl: +44 78 24 81 17 94

alice@thefilter.com

http://www.thefilter.com

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