Online television recommendation engine BeeTV has raised $8 million in second round financing led by Italian VC fund Innogest. BeeTV does for TV viewers what Amazon does for readers, ingesting likes and dislikes by tracking viewing habits then curating personally contoured line-ups of programming.
BeeTV’s proprietary, contextual matching algorithm not only tracks favorite genres; it also attempts to anticipate moods by calling into account dayparts, context, demographics and behavior.
The Milan, Italy-based startup founded in 2006 by an international team of experienced technology and media experts. Looks like these guys know what they are doing, and put a lot of research behind it all.
The company is positioning the white label technology (sold to cable, satellite or IPTV providers) to work across multiple platforms, including broadcast TV, iptv app, VOD, SVOD, PPV, and PVR/Catch-up. The system anticipates what you want to see, when you want to see it and pushes the relevant content to that subscriber via TV, PC or mobile.
The TV Guide doesn’t know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what you’ve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or which videos you’re likely going to enjoy consuming right now on your PC or even your mobile phone. With the sheer volume of available channels and VOD content out there, that’s becoming quite a problem for many people
Such intelligence is one of the missing pieces when it comes to monetizing digital content because it will provide relevance and context to multiplatform content consumption.
Relevance is a key word the Ninthlink team has been empahsizing here with clients — how relevant is your brand to the lives of your customers? Does your brand integrate with the consumer’s everyday life? How many times a day do they think about your brand? Can they live without it? Do they recommend it other people the way a consumer would recommend BeeTV for content viewing entertainment needs?