Digital DNA

One of the arguments I have made in all of my presentations/panels/keynotes on why content filters are an absolute necessity is that there is going to be a deluge of connected devices in 2011 (that in turn will lead to a proliferation of content and content services, leading to consumer paralyses through too much choice).

Well, CES kicks off in Vegas tomorrow (Wednesday 5th) and I am expecting the floodgates to open for tablets, hybrid notebooks/tablets, Smart connected TVs, more performing smartphones.

So far I have already read about:
- The Sony Anzu super thin phone built for entertainment content
- The $200 Android tablet from Taiwanese LCD screen manufacturer AOC (watch out though! The price point and the fact it is 8 inches are exciting… but it is important to note that the spec isn’t all that great – check out the full details from PC Mag).
- The Chinese U1 hybrid laptop whose screen detaches and turns into ‘LePad’.
- Amazon are developing Kindle apps for Android and Windows 7 based tablets.
- Anticipation for the Motorola Android-powered tablet. There’s a great video teaser on Engadget.

And I am pretty sure we will also see a number of announcements on services that will affect our living room content experience: e.g. Netflix announcement today that they have convinced a number of TV, WebTV and Blu-ray manufacturers to add a ‘Netflix’ one-click short cut button on their remotes. Cool.

2011 will be completely mad for connected devices.

Many have predicted that 2011 will be a big year for video streaming into the living room. And look at this, it’s only the 4th January and already Intel have just announced the launch of ‘Intel Insider’ – an online movie and video service that will stream to connected TVs.

In the US this is becoming a very crowded market with retail giants like Sears, Walmart and Bestbuy up against traditional TV and movie folk like Sony and Netflix and more recent services from Google. In the UK, we have yet to see such activity, but with Youview launching this year and rumoured UK launches for Hulu and Netflix to join existing providers like Blinkbox, Lovefilm and SeeSaw, things are hotting up.

In the early days of The Filter, back end of 2007, Peter Gabriel (long-time suporter and investor) had a chat with me about his vision. “I want a Zen Master. Something that knows everything about everything that is out there. Something that knows everything about me and can therefore get me stuff that I would most like to enjoy and serve it up at the right time, in the right place and in the most appropriate way.”

You can’t deny that a personal content filter with that level of understanding and intelligence would be ace. But, as I was the chap he had just hired to turn that vision into a business, I did wonder (a tad nervously) whether it could be achieved. Like any time soon.

Well, three years later, at The Filter we have made some major progress in delivering context, taste and content-based recommendations to the big media companies. We have built systems that log and understand more and more about individual behaviour and context through consumption. However, we have not yet connected all of the data in the world which is key for PG’s Zen Master to know everything about everything.

So, who else has made progress in delivering (a) a system that knows everything about everything and/or (b) a system that knows everything about me

There are a number of recommender tools that millions of people use every day for different types of content: like Pandora for music, Amazon for books/gifts or Netflix for movies. But, there is (as of yet) no connection between the different content types or these services – and I can’t see that happening any time soon. So, my Zen Master cannot know when to feed me with a book recommendation for my Kindle, versus a playlist for a run or a movie for my romantic night in.

If not from the main content services then, will the solution for connecting and understanding all content come from our social networks? Facebook connect and the ‘Like’ button is clearly an attempt to catalogue everything that matters to people and use the connections between people as a personal filter. With 500m users, this is one of a very small list of companies that could really take a stab at understanding everything about everything. Facebook could accelerate this via acquiring major movie, music, video services in the next 12-18 months. If not, even a network with its reach will take a long time to catalogue everything.

Twitter and Twitter-related apps have added an interesting dimension, taking the view that you don’t need a system that knows everything about everything – all you need is for people to be connected to enough interesting tweeps to use them as the curators. This has lead to a number of startups like Paper.li and Flipoard that pretty-fy my Twitter feed (and other feeds) so that I can more easily consume all the content that has been filtered by the people I follow. For all the beauty of Flipboard, there is still something currently missing for it to get close to being the Zen Master – and that is the content it serves up so beautifully is entirely driven by what is in my feeds right now and is thrown away the next minute. It is therefore driven by supply not by my specific demands and needs at a given point in time.

Therefore, when it comes to PG’s Zen Master vision, Twitter currently adds a level of filtering, but it only works if you happen to stumble on the right tweet for you at the right time. There is so much content there that you could blink and miss the most relevant piece of content ever…

In terms of looking for technologies that understand everything about me, some of the most interesting developments have come from personalisation services like Hunch: you answer a bunch of interesting questions and Hunch starts recommending stuff that you will like. I have always felt that the approach of understanding people through the choices they make (another company, Imagini, categorize people based on responses to images) is a great way to understand what people are like and segment them. But it doesn’t always work for highly granular choices (I have just listened to Message in the Bottle, what should I listen to next?) – which is where a tool like The Filter helps.

So for my money, Facebook is probably the closest to building a database that could know everything about everything. If that database of connections could then be interrogated and filtered by Hunch and The Filter (for knowing everything about me), that could be a combination that would give Peter his sought-after Zen Master.

Everyone’s at it. Predicting what might happen on the eve of a new year. So why not me?

My predictions are focussed squarely on digital entertainment and how we will enjoy it. I have stuck to just 3 main predictions. So, by no means a comprehensive list, but certainly the main themes that I think will see emerge this coming year.

1. The Explosion in demand/supply of personal content filters

After 3 years of preaching that the imminent arrival of a more personalised web means that data-smart companies will win in media, I am glad to see that we are on the cusp of moving into the third phase of the web – from ‘our web’ to ‘my web’.

Without personal filters, the deluge of choice will actually result in no choice at all as we will be paralyzed by too much data. Taste and context based navigation, search and discovery is now a necessity rather than a nice feature to have.

Personal content filters will appear either fully integrated in applications (e.g. Gig Finder from Nokia uses the music you play on your phone + your location to recommend gigs near you that you will like that are near you) or as stand alone recommendation apps that can be applied to various services (e.g. Youniverse or Hunch).

2. The end of the living room as we know it

In 2010, we got a taste of what the living room of the future may look like. Launches from Google TV and the arrival of movie streaming services on connected TVs, games consoles and the iPad have opened our eyes. We now ‘get’ that the kind of cloud-based media service we have been enjoying for music for the last 3 years will become available for all other types of media – and now the challenge is to minimize the time it takes to find the content, and maximise the time enjoying it at the right time, in the right place on the right device and with the right people.

At The Filter, my team are currently working on next generation content services for the living room. Where search, navigation and discovery are optimised to be more relevant to the context and the individual. I can see this approach catching on throughout 2011.

3. Advertising will be worthless if not relevant

Sounds obvious, I know. But ‘dumb’ advertising that takes no account of any/all of the available data to ensure relevance will go from a majority to a minority in terms of views.

Advertising that is hyper relavant to the individual is not perceived as advertising (a word that is synonymous with interruptive) and more as highly targeted offers or alerts.

In 2011, we will see an increase in content services that will reduce the quantity of advertising but increase both the intelligence of the targeting and feedback from its users. We will all get used to being asked whether we would rather see the Sprite, Diet Coke or Coke Zero ad before that episode of 30 Rock. And we will not flinch when an alert for buying a concert ticket for an artist we have recently become obsessed with pops up on our screen.

So that’s what I think of 2011: more personal content filters, a revolution in our living rooms and more user control and intelligent targeting in the ad market.

I have only been involved with VCs for 3 years. Which doesn’t make me an expert. But I can say this – they can be a ‘funny’ bunch at times and it takes some time to get used to them. I have been asked for advice by pre-funding entrepreneurs about VCs and what to expect, and all I can ever say is that if you want to play with VCs the best thing you can do is understand what motivates them. That means you need to get to grips with their business model. And also what the individual is about. Are they a VC only motivated by cash, or do they genuinely get excited about working with brilliant people (as well as being motivated by cash)?

I found a good article that describes how the VC model works and also debunks a few myths. If you don’t understand your VC or are planning to start working with one, read this.

The last 6 months have been a blur. Mostly due to work. We had a crazy start to the year announcing new deals with Dailymotion and NBC, and also the appointment of ex-Googler Douglas Merrill to our Board.

Following our growth, Martin (Founder/CTO) and I have added more great people to our team and I have delegated a lot of what I was doing. The aim is to give me the time I need to focus on building The Filter’s profile in the tech and media industry and that includes contributing to my blog and The Filter’s team blog.

I have been asked to speak at Tech Crunch’s Christmas Crunch event on the 15th December. My presentation is called “The Real-Time Effect on Entertainment Content” – and my two big themes will be the way real-time has changed the conversation around live events and the types of real-time data that have an effect on the content we consume.

Any ideas/thoughts or examples you think should use. Please feel free to shout.

I was drawn to the story on YouTube trying to “avoid Van Halen fatigue” by improving recommendations.
My team at The Filter have been delivering recommendations based on behavior and consumption (rather than based on key words/tags) for some of the biggest video companies on the web (US TV networks and video aggregators). So, we know that what YouTube are talking about is true – delivering keyword based recommendations creates fatigue, whereas, using behavior and consumption data delivers increases in video views per visit (by over 20%) and in repeat visits.

Just seen the latest Nielsen numbers for video consumption on Mashable. In the US alone, there were 11.2 billion video streams in July – that’s some 31% growth compared to the year before. Mashable dig further into the stats pointing out that “there were 135.9 million unique viewers of online video… that means that the average viewer watched 82.4 streams in July.”

This continued growth in video consumption in the US confirms what we know – that there is a lot of activity in the video related digital market. Traditional media companies are digitising more content and promoting their online video services, and then digital start-ups (like Boxee and Hulu) are gaining traction. This growth in new content and video services is not slowing down any time soon, making it easier for people to find specific content (because it is all available through search) but making it harder to discover new content because there is too much of it.

My team at The Filter have been working closely with some of the top 10 video providers in Europe and the US to increase user engagement by finding ways to help discovery through offering relevant video recommendations. The results have been really exciting – in all of the services we have been working on over the last 12 months, we have been able to deliver uplifts in video streams per visit of 20-50%, and users who get more relevant recommendations also visit more frequently.

I’ve been playing around with a beta of eGuiders. It’s a site that uses industry insiders and pioneers to find great video making it easy for us to just enjoy great video without having to view millions of rubbish videos to find the gems.

There is no doubt that you can start watching great video content within 5 seconds. I was drawn to Obama’s ad-libbed election night speech (Fired Up? Ready to go!) – I never actually got to see this at the time and it is brilliant. And I then went back to the home page and picked another 3 or 4 videos all of which were great. No dross. I then started to look into the individual eGuiders (the curators of the site) and used them as a way of finding good content. I think the site could do more to suggest/recommend video to me once I have started my session – maybe using my behaviour to start personalising the recommended videos.

But other than that, eGuiders is a simple and effective curated video service that delivers what it says it will. I wish it well.