Content Recommendations Across VOD, Magazines and HbbTV for a European Media Leader

FTV Prima

FTV Prima faced the challenge of personalizing content for millions of monthly visitors across diverse platforms. The manual curation by the editorial staff during a substantial traffic influx complicated efforts to ensure a smooth user experience, hindering progress toward the overarching goal of increasing watch time and improving user recirculation across their various platforms.

Recombee helped Prima to fully automate its editorial content for multiple platforms (HbbTV, online magazines, VOD) and deliver personalised content recommendations across its entire ecosystem, while significantly increasing not only the volume of advertising consumed online, but also other key performance metrics.

+34%

Video views
on VOD platform

+73%

Ads views
on VOD platform

2.3x

Higher click-through rate
from Linear TV to HbbTV

Situation

A very large volume and wide variety of video content available across multiple platforms.
Content recommendations made manually predominantly by editorial staff.
Desire to improve the quality of personalization for millions of monthly visitors.
The huge volume of traffic consisting of millions of monthly visitors.

Objectives

Increase content discovery and the number of titles consumed.
Increase the time spent consuming content to maximize advertising offers.
Increase visitors' recirculation on online magazines.
Real-time personalized content recommendations for every individual visitor.
Personalization across multiple platforms.

Solution

Real-time recommendations across multiple platforms FTV Prima.

Online magazines
VOD platform prima+
Linear TV (HbbTV)

Sophistically tailored algorithms to meet the specific requirements for different scenarios.

The unique connection of all platforms into a single database allows the linking of user profile identities across platforms for unified recommendations.

Automated content recommendations.

Personalized recommendations on multiple devices (web, mobile apps).

More than 55 unique scenarios with fully AI-driven recommendations on different platforms.

Benefits & Results

VOD Platform
Data after the launch of prima+

+34% in video views
+73% in ads views
2.5x more heavy users
(more than 3 titles/month)

Linear TV to HbbTV

2.3x increase in click-through rate

Online Magazines

1.5M click-through recommendation boxes per month on CNN Prima News
300k click-through recommendations boxes per month on Zeny
+10% recirculation on CNN Prima News magazine

Recombee Solution for FTV Prima

Unique Connection of All FTV Prima Platforms

A unified database enables FTV Prima to:

Connect users' profile identities across multiple platforms.
Work with a comprehensive set of data collected from different sources.
Deliver a highly personalized experience wherever the user appears.
Easily manage all recommendations across platforms from one place.

Use Cases

VOD Platform Recommendations

Real-time personalization of content and search for each user on the VOD platform prima+ with dozens of customized scenarios used in different places.

Selected For You

Collaborative filtering models and popularity-based models are used to recommend visitors personalized content on the home page right from the start to drive higher engagement.

The row is updated immediately after the user first interacts (e.g. a click on the specific title to watch), and becomes more tailored as the user interacts with the platform.

In the case of titles with episodes, Recombee takes into account the nature of each series in order to recommend the user the most relevant episode at that particular moment.

Personalized Search

When a user searches for specific titles, it is crucial to assist them in finding the most relevant content as swiftly as possible.

This scenario is powered by Recombee's fine-tuned search engine, which is bolstered by popularity models to refine search results, ensuring that only the most relevant titles are recommended.

Similar Movies

This scenario is used specifically for similar movie recommendations on a movie details page. The moment the user selects and clicks on a movie, a detail page for that movie appears and the user is also offered a personalized row showcasing similar titles he might be also interested in.

The similarity is ensured through a combination of tags (e.g., romantic movies), used by Prima to internally describe movies, and collaborative filtering with content-based models. This approach considers the titles consumed by other users who have also watched the selected movie.

Most Watched

By utilizing popularity-based models and various custom business rules, Recombee creates highly engaging rows that combine the most popular titles in the specified category (e.g., the most popular movies for kids).

In this scenario, Recombee also delivers either long-term or short-term popular titles by identifying trending content. The platforms selected by users (e.g., mobile device or desktop) determine the source of popularity for this scenario.

Key Benefits

Recommending the most viewed content among mobile and desktop users ensures that suggestions are based on the viewing habits and preferences of a similar user demographic.
Recommendation models are improved by analyzing the most viewed content across different device users.

Advanced Solution for Episodes and Series Recommendations

Prima's team fully took advantage of the possibility of customizing the behavior of the recommender with their custom logic. In this scenario, Recombee detects 3 types of series and then recommends combination of episodes in one row, taking into account how the user might consume these types of series:

Trending series - when the user wants to see the newest episode everyone else talks about
Serialized series - when the user wants to continuously watch one episode after another
Episodic series - episodes of a series are not connected to a continuous overarching story, and each episode can be watched independently

Custom logic

To ensure that users do not miss any news, the latest episode is always recommended.
The next unwatched episode in order is recommended, so the users can seamlessly continue watching another part of the story.
The best-suited episodes are randomly recommended to users.

Key Benefits of Advanced Solution for Episodes Recommendations

Increase time spent on the platform, resulting in higher ad views.
Increase user satisfaction with a highly personalised experience based on the way how users want to consume the content.
High engagement and views.

Online Magazines Recommendations

Driving traffic across Prima's various domains and fostering recirculation through article recommendations.

Suggested For You

Recombee helped FTV Prima to create a unique interconnection of magazines to maximize user engagement, recirculation and time spent consuming content.

By a combination of text processing, real-time collaborative filtering, and content-based models, Recombee provides magazine visitors with a mix of recommendations (1,2,3) from other domains to support the focus on recirculation.

The scenario is used across different domains including CNN News, Zoom, Cool, Fresh, Zeny and others.

Key Benefits of Cross-Domain Recommendations

Drive traffic between online magazines with recommendation boxes.
Increase recirculation.
Provide users with a wide range of content options.
Increase time spent on platforms and the number of ads viewed.

Recommendations in Linear TV to HbbTV

Recommendations of titles directly during live broadcasting through the HbbTV interface guide the user to the VOD channels. There, similar titles and shows are personalized based on their historical interactions.

Linear TV to HbbTV Recommendations

To maintain user engagement with relevant content within the Prima+ ecosystem and prevent them from leaving, Recombee was implemented in a special project.

Users watching linear TV were recommended to view similar content at the conclusion of the live broadcast through the interactive HbbTV box.

After clicking the red button on their TV controller, users were directed to a recommended VOD channel that closely matched the title on Linear TV, determined by a combination of metadata and custom models.

Key Benefits of Cross-Platform Recommendations

Preventing users from leaving the ecosystem.
Encourage traditional TV users to discover the VOD platform.
Individually personalised experience across platforms.

“Recombee allows us to modify how we want the recommendations to behave across our platforms in very specific use cases. The implementation of Recombee on the VOD platform prima+ helped us to increase video views by 34% and ad views by 73%, resulting in a significant rise in advertising revenue. Another major success has been the growth of recirculation, which is our top priority on online magazine platforms. We are currently discussing extending their recommendations also to our emails. Highly valued partnership!“

Jan Lajka

Chief Data Officer, FTV Prima

About FTV Prima

FTV Prima is one of the biggest media companies in central Europe and currently broadcasts 8 TV channels and 6 radio stations. It has a broad portfolio of websites, print magazines and is also a pioneer in combining VOD with HbbTV.

Their most popular platform, prima+, is visited by millions of viewers per month, consuming a wide range of content, such as TV series, movies, or documentaries.

FTV Prima has also partnered with CNN International Commercial and now broadcasts its own channel, CNN Prima News.

Visit iprima.cz