Now that television programming extends to a variety of services beyond traditional television, it can be difficult to know what to watch next and what is popular, given the large selection of content. An app called TV Time helps with this, allowing fans to watch the shows they're watching, discover new programs and socialize with other fans after each episode. Now, the company is redoubling its ability to help you find your next show with the launch of personalized recommendations.
Your recommendations are based on understanding through the application of dozens of signals, including things like the shows you've watched, the ones you've watched, the ones your friends are watching, the ones you've watched participated, the ones you preferred more.
You can further filter your recommendations by network, status (completed, forthcoming, etc.), genre, service if any, and other factors.
(Above: TV Time identifies me as a sci-fi nerve that has not yet watched Stargate, I know, I know!)
What makes his recommendations unique is that they are based on your viewing behavior on the entire TV, and not just on a single service like Netflix, explains the ### 39; company.
"There is an incredible amount of quality TV made today – some budgets are crazy – and because all these different platforms do it, it becomes more confusing for the consumer to know where to look, to get remember where, "said Dan Brian, COO of TV Time." It's hard to tear everything apart. "
Similarly, determining what to watch next is also difficult because there are so many ways to track the content you like, but none of this data is currently available on all platforms. That is, Netflix does not know what you like on Amazon or HBO, etc.
"We took the 8 billion TV episodes that had been tracked in the application – episodes from all existing platforms," says Brian. "And because we have this 360-degree vision of what people are watching, we should be able to make the best recommendations on what to watch next."
In practice, the recommendation algorithm supported a little too much on the back catalog choices of the TV, I found in the tests, and I did not take also strongly account for favored emissions, as I would like. But the promise of machine learning is that its recommendations will improve over time, plus it will serve to find and track new shows.
The recommendations feature, available in the "Discovery" section of TV Time, is the latest addition to an app that addresses more to TV fans, rather than a more casual viewer. But it's something that the company is now trying to change as it grows.
TV Time began life as WhipClip, a source for a legal collection of GIFs of favorite shows, before pivoting to become a social TV community.
This is a start-up in the past who tried to enter, such as GetGlue (acquired by i.TV half a decade ago) or Miso, pioneer of Social TV, which closed in 2014. It can be said that these companies have arrived too early. before the trend of string cutting gives way to dozens of streaming services, and à la carte options to build your own TV package.
While in the past, all of America seemed to watch the most popular TV shows at the same time, finding someone today who loves a show you are watching is less common. And finding them at the same time as you is even rarer, thanks to the end of "rendezvous on TV", for almost everything, except for a small number of hits like "Game of Thrones".
This makes an app like TV Time feels like a place where you can really find "your people" – whether it's sci-fi friends, or reality TV addicts, or whatever that's all else.
Beyond his new recommendations, you can use the app to track favorite shows, find out when shows are coming back or discover what's popular in the community, and more. In your profile, you can set broadcasts as favorites, track your personal TV display data, and see how your posts are broadcast in TV Time communities. You can also follow friends to see what the people you know are showing.
After marking an episode as "watched," you can then jump into the community to see the reactions, which are shared as GIFs, photos, videos, memes, and more. The application makes building memes easy, thanks to an included set of screenshots that can be mixed with other content, and then shared with the community. You can also record a video reaction – something that is a popular activity on YouTube.
There is also a surprising number of community involvement.
A show has many more than a hundred reactions posted by fans, many with hundreds of likes. And an animated show like "The Walking Dead" can have hundreds of video reactions alone after a new episode.
The company says that there are now more than one million people who use the application daily, where they can follow one of over 60,000 broadcasts and more than 8 billion TV episodes. Users register with Time TV about 45 million times a month, and engage more than half a million times by posting comments, photos, GIFs, videos, and more. Moreover.
While TV Time is improving these recommendations in the coming weeks, it will also begin to display your "TV Time score" – how well your interests match a given content – in all pages of the app.
With its new ability to make personalized suggestions, TV Time hopes to attract more casual television fans, and eventually sell its data on what people are watching to help producers and television networks fund their next shows. as well as providing competitive ideas, among others.
"But we will never sell individual profiles of people," says Brian. "We work with partners on aggregated, anonymized data on trends," he says.
Today, TV Time generates revenue through a premium level, which has tens of thousands of paid users. But this will probably be abandoned as its data business expands.
TV Time is a free download on iOS and Android.