Personalized Catch-up & DVR: VOD or Linear, That is the Question

Abstract

The expansion of TV services such as DVR and, more recently, Catch-up have removed the temporal constraint typical of the Linear "appointment" TV enabling users to watch content they love at any time and on-demand. However, the DVR and Catch-up TV libraries, while providing a convenient time-shifted "on-demand" consumption, are indeed composed by content recently aired on a linear channel, so that they have more in common with Linear TV than they have with VOD. In this talk we will present and discuss the main challenges and some possible solutions to personalize the user experience with content from DVR and Catch-up TV, such as: (i) The consumption pattern is strongly affected by the context (e.g., time and device used to access the video service). (ii) Some content is consumed serially and still follows seasonal dynamics (e.g., TV Series). (iii) The system is fed with a massive and very dynamic streams of data (e.g., new content arriving right after broadcast, signals of user interactions). (iv) The same piece of content may coexist across multiple services provided by the same operator (e.g., linear schedule, network-DVR, catch-up TV, subscription VOD, rental VOD).