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Digital video brought with it the promise of an expansive data-driven future, but the market is still waiting to collect.
This eight-part series looks at how the media and entertainment industries are leveraging growing amounts of data on viewers and consumers to further their business models.
Read more from this series here:
Big data: Pay TV's great hope or great hype
Big data: Programmers target better ad deals
Big data: A home run for sports telecasts
Big data: The name of the game
Big data: The Hollywood opportunity
Big data: Social media, the new advertising commodity
Netflix Inc. demonstrated the possibilities, carving out a space where even lesser-known and underperforming titles could find a place in the monetization chain via powerful recommendation engines built to guide users to new content. But recommendation tools have failed to keep pace with the flood of digital content in recent years, and the increasingly crowded OTT field makes it even more difficult for users to find what they want. Recommendations are often painfully one dimensional: "Because you liked Star Wars: Star Trek."
"[Hyperpersonalization] exists in so many other categories. Why does it not exist for the category that users actually care more about than any other category, that they spend more disposable time with, which is their film, TV, online video?" asked Xavier Kochhar in an interview. Kochhar is the CEO of a company working to create more robust content data by tagging, cataloging and organizing video content on the internet as part of an initiative they call The Video Genome Project.
With most of the industry's data efforts to date focused on getting to know more about users, on the content side, digital video usually is...