Nimrod Hoofien is the classic distracted modern viewer. But it’s not the iPad he’s obsessed with. A Netflix subscriber, he prefers to watch video on his MacBook Air -- mostly because he needs a keyboard to shoot off emails.
"I haven't bought into the second-screen story," he says, referring to the growing number of people watching TV with one eye while glancing at smartphones and tablets with the other. "I understand it in the context of the Web, but it's hard to imagine watching TV in a living room on a large screen and then also trying to watch on a small screen like the Kindle Fire."
At Ooyala, Hoofien and his team build the cutting-edge products that the company is known for: rich video analytics, new ways to monetize online video, and tools for a deeper and more personal viewing experience for consumers. Yet there are still missing pieces, he says. For instance? “Better and more nuanced recommendations on what to watch,” Hoofien replies. “Most recommendation engines just suggest the obvious. People really want fresh content they won’t discover on their own.”
When catching up on his favorite shows on Netflix, Hoofien likes to have episodes playing in the background as he sends emails or does work on his MacBook. That’s not so easily done on a second screen like an iPad, where viewing is a high-engagement activity that requires viewers to “lean forward” and interact constantly with the device and its content.
But Hoofien argues that, at the end of the day, consumers want to “lean back” and channel surf. That way the TV does all the hard work, and the viewer can kick back with a cold one.
The online industry sees tablets as vital to growth. The number of tablets shipped in Q3 of 2011 was 18.1 million -- an impressive 23.9 per cent from Q2. Viewing time was 30 percent higher on tablets than other devices in the third quarter, according to data from the VideoMind Video Index Report.
And while long-form content is a growing portion of people’s online video viewing, short shows and clips remain front and center. That means viewers have to choose new content every few minutes, or even every few seconds.
"You can't just sit there and enjoy the content you want in a continuous way until you get tired of it," Hoofien says. "You're always making choices. That constant demand to pick the next video becomes a real problem. Discovery becomes a real problem -- it’s a lot harder in a clip-by-clip versus video-by-video world.”
Current recommendation engines aren’t up to the job, he argues. It’s no surprise that Netflix suggests that “Big Bang Theory” fans check out “Mythbusters.” “A good recommendation system will show you stuff you may like that you wouldn’t find otherwise,” says Hoofien. “Finding ‘Mythbusters’ is fairly easy if you’re already into geek-chic.”
The cultish show “Firefly” would be a smarter suggestion, he says. “Non-obvious discovery is a huge deal that’s very hard to do unless you can see patterns in a really fine way. This is not the kind of discovery done by metadata analysis. You need to somehow figure out how to tell if small deviations from typical patterns actually denote interesting connections.”
To find that answer, Hoofien says those engines should pull in social, geographic, language, cultural and even socioeconomic data. “That’s what I want personalization to be,” he says. Publishers could gather this kind of information through Facebook Connect or user subscriptions.
Hoofien sees this as an opportunity for Ooyala to take the lead. Using the open-source frameworks Hadoop and Storm, he and his team can speed-sift vast amounts of data across many machines. The process spots deep and sometimes obscure patterns, which are pure gold when it comes to content recommendation.
With this more fine-tuned discovery process, online video can look back on the traditional TV experience and and improve upon it. Even with more features and distractions online, Web TV will likely retain its "lean-back" viewing qualities.
“Even on Netflix, with all its greatness, I still have to pick episode by epsiode,” says Hoofien. “Why? I’m very obviously sitting here. Just show me the next episode.”
Follow Hoofien on Twitter.
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