When it comes to the TV user interface, less could be more
In a world where attention is increasingly fragmented, Pay TV operators can differentiate their user experience by making content discovery faster, more personalised and more likely to serve up something they love.
Success could even depend on how far operators can reduce the importance of the user interface (UI) itself.
During an Achieving leadership in AI-driven content discovery webcast hosted by The Media Leader last month, Chris van der Linden, director of entertainment platforms and ad-interim director of AI roadmap at the pan-European Pay TV operator Liberty Global, outlined a UI philosophy that can be summed up as ‘Less is more’.
In the near term, this leads to a more personalised home page for each viewer, where they see their favourite apps, relevant recommendations, sports schedules tailored to their passions, and links to the linear channels they watch.
The hope is that the seamless content discovery typical of the electronic programme guide (EPG) can be replicated for a super-aggregated and on-demand world.
The key message is that the UI is a means to an end.
“It is not as if customers like the user interface and want to spend time there. They just want to consume the content,” van der Linden declared.
According to the Liberty Global executive, typical advanced user experiences today, featuring attractive content rails and poster art on the home menu, could be a stepping stone to something even more streamlined.
“For consumers, the best UI is really no UI, and that is the direction of travel.”
He has a vision of a home page where video plays immediately, anticipating what the individual viewer (or household) might want to see, complemented by conversational search.
“You have a lean-back experience where you effectively ‘vote’ with your remote control, and lean-forward discovery through a conversation with the platform,” he explains.
van der Linden thinks this combination will appeal to most TV viewers, and other webcast speakers agreed on the need to streamline the content journey.
Renáta Fülöp-Árvai, head of TV and content services at One Hungary (a telco and Pay TV provider in that country), is also focused on this endeavour, helping viewers cope with the ‘paradox of choice’.
She sees an opportunity to combine personalised content rails, relevant curated content highlights, and branded pages focused on major TV events as part of an effort to increase viewing time on the Pay TV platform.
Adapting to each user
Over time, the UI moves from being a static grid to something fluid that adapts to each user and moment in time, she predicts.
So, someone who binges deep VOD catalogues daily sees a different kind of ‘home screen’ to the casual weekend viewer who is probably presented with the biggest movies and hit shows.
These UX innovations are being built on a better understanding of what viewers want – based on their behavior and other intent signals – combined with a better understanding of content thanks to enriched metadata.
A third building block for the next-generation UX is AI.
Ben Gidley, senior director, product management for OpenTV ENTera (the platform operator UX, discovery and personalisation solution) at Nagravision, agrees with the potential for personalised home screens.
He believes users should not realise that their menu is different to their neighbours’.
Pay TV operators can be more confident when personalising the all-important home screen content rails thanks to better user interest and content data signals and AI, he suggests.
“We offer the tools to mix editorial picks with AI choices in those rails, giving balance,” he adds.
Gidley believes the secret to better content discovery is how you combine the improved operator owned user signals (e.g. viewing behaviour, context) and content signals (e.g. enriched metadata).
“Technology is helping the industry get much better at correlating this information to achieve more accurate results,” he observes.
“AI is really good at combining complicated datasets like this and finding relationships that may not be obvious.”
Operators have rich data, he notes, picked up as viewers navigate through menus hundreds of times per month, leaving behind clues each time about what they like.
During the webcast, Rafal Fagas, chief technology officer at the metadata services provider Media Press Group, explained how our understanding of content itself is improving.
His company uses ‘metadata enrichment’ to expand upon the programming information that content suppliers (studios and production companies, for example) supply with their shows and movies.
Often the original information is designed for humans to read in a programme guide summary but recommendation and search systems, especially in a world of AI, benefit from additional machine-readable data.
In both cases, human editors can enrich the metadata.
Deep-searching the internet
Fagas revealed how his company is using agentic AI to automatically deep-search the Internet to find what reviewers and other commentators are saying about content, among other things.
Given the crucial importance of trust in the TV environment, the agentic process includes comparison of results, resolution of result contradictions and finally a human check to ensure results are accurate.
This will later be complemented by AI analysis of the content itself, at a scene level.
Fagas says: “Information from the web tends towards what people think about content, so is subjective.
“You can provide the [AI] model with an objective view by letting the model watch the content.
“Multi-modal LLMs are very capable of understanding what is happening in scenes and understanding images.”
Gidley sums up the ultimate ambition. “Someone turns on the TV and sees what they want to watch, first time.
“That has to be the goal, providing a fundamentally lean-back experience.”
As operators make greater use of AI, they should not view it as a consumer-facing feature in itself but as back-office technology, according to van der Linden.
“We must not let AI enablement become a technology-led conversation,” he says. “It must be a customer experience-led conversation.
“We are not taking them on a consciously AI-driven journey. As much as possible we should keep that magic behind the curtains.”
Other content covered during this one-hour discussion included:
- How Liberty Global’s SuperSearch AI-powered conversational search works
- How to manage the costs of AI-enabled content discovery features from personalised content rails to conversational search
- The guardrails operators are seeking when deploying AI-powered content discovery
- The impact our panelists and viewers believe AI-powered content discovery can have on total viewing time on Pay TV platforms
- How content partners benefit from operator UX innovations, including AI-powered discovery.
You can access the free webcast here.