TELEVISION viewers in the Middle East and India are using Scottish data technology to help them find content on streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video after two major contract wins for a Glasgow-based company.
ThinkAnalytics said homes across 20 countries in the Middle East, including Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, would now be using its technology.
The company’s content discovery and viewer analytics platform is powered by artificial intelligence and is currently used by almost 400 million TV viewers globally.
Subscribers to TV streaming services with OSN, the main pay-TV network across the Middle East and North Africa, will use ThinkAnalytics’ platform, Think360, to help them find and recommend TV shows.
OSN is headquartered in Dubai and distributes movies, TV shows and sports from major studios and networks including Disney, HBO, NBC Universal, Fox, Paramount, MGM, and Sony.
“Part of our business is understanding the content in all the countries we operate in and understanding the viewers across the devices they watch content on,” said ThinkAnalytics founder and chief technology officer Peter Docherty. “In the Middle East, Arabic is obviously important, so this is giving viewers a personalised experience in 20 different countries. From start to finish, we were live in less than eight weeks on this deployment.”
In India, ThinkAnalytics has a large scale deal that will give subscribers of Tata Sky, one of India’s top pay TV and streaming providers, personalised content discovery across 11 streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video and the Indian Disney+ brand, Hotstar Premium.
This is known in the TV industry as aggregation or super-aggregation, and is about saving consumers the headache of looking for something to watch across multiple networks and content providers.
“Typically, viewers who are subscribed to multiple TV services might have to launch two, three, four or five apps individually to find something to watch,” Mr Docherty said. “Then it’s about trying to remember where that show was that you liked and which app it’s on. Aggregation or super-aggregation is basically having one place where multiple streaming services are combined into a single experience.”
ThinkAnalytics’ technology combines machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to understand viewer behaviour and tag content on a granular level, including the different elements of a plot, narrative styles, formats and moods. This boosts viewer engagement and loyalty, the company says, because it helps viewers find content they want to watch, and also discover content they might otherwise have missed.
ThinkAnalytics was founded in 2001 and started specialising in media and entertainment in 2005.
“When we originally started, we were working across various different industries doing real time data mining, which is now called machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Mr Docherty explained. “Then in 2005, we moved into personalised content discovery, search and recommendations. And we've really focused on this ever since.”
The company now describes itself as “the most deployed personalised content discovery platform worldwide,” behind only Netflix and Amazon Prime in subscriber numbers.
“We support 43 languages and have customers in 38 countries around the world, including Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, Asia, Singapore and Malaysia,” Mr Docherty said. “So we’re expanding the territories we cover.”
Mr Docherty said the company, which employs about 100 staff, was currently recruiting software developers, information scientists and data scientists.
“There’s a lot of great talent in Scotland and high quality graduates coming out, not just in computer science but in other related disciplines,” he said. “So it’s not just companies from Silicon Valley that can do this.”
ThinkAnalytics has offices in Los Angeles, Singapore, London and Pune, India, as well as Glasgow. Other new developments for the company include launching a service that allows TV companies to deliver targeted advertising.
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