Advanced audience targeting for IPTV

This project seeks to build an audience profiling tool for use by IPTV ( Internet Protocol
delivered Television ) operators. These platforms offer a new way of delivering television
over broadband type networks. As such as they use IP technology and have the potential to
create and support much more intuitive personalised television services than the existing
distribution systems with which they compete - ie terrestrial , satellite and cable. However
ownership of the networks is largely in the hands of the global telco community for whom
television has not been a traditional core business. They are therefore slow to innovate in this
space and as a result IPTV has been characterised by relatively slow growth in most countries
since inception around 2003 and a certain dependency on smaller companies to provide
drivers for differentiation strategies. This project addresses one such differentiation strategy
based on providing the end consumer with a highly targeted television service based
exclusively around his/her individual tastes.
The key deliverable will be a basic prototype demonstrator which will show what is
potentially achievable using real live consumer data sourced from a UK network operator
when aggregated and converted into a targeting tool. The underlying key premise is that there
is a linkage between TV viewing habits and the likely consumption behaviour patterns of
consumers. This information exists in the form of clues which can be deduced from both
programme and channel viewing trends evaluated over time. The revealed patterns are totally
individual - just like fingerprints - and once properly interpreted and aggregated they are
invaluable to any advertiser.
The project output will be a software based programme which allows the consumer to reap
significant benefit from the technology whilst remaining totally passive – ie they are not
requested to interact with the system although the system in turn continually learns more and
more about them in real time. The interaction is there but is non – obvious to the consumer
and therefore does not distract from their normal enjoyment of TV viewing. Something
similar already exists with internet based recommendation technologies but similar
developments in the TV space remain immature.
This evolution will provide a key next step towards intelligent television networks. The
commercial end game is to refine the analytics and the software to a point where this kind of
rationale can be used as a basis for making decisions about the likely spending patterns of
individuals within households and then households within audience universes. In addition the
project will construct a new business model to fit the initiatives into the new IPTV based eco
systems.
Growth projections from analysts suggest that this type of intuitive analytics will become
increasingly dominant for the provision of accurate targeting systems in next generation
television platforms over the next five years.