Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Digitalsmiths for Breakthrough Innovation in the Personalized Content Discovery Market

- Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery® offers an accurate yet flexible discovery platform that enables pay TV service providers to drive customer loyalty and revenues

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, March 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on recent analysis of the personalized content discovery market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Digitalsmiths with the 2013 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership. Digitalsmiths' Seamless Discovery® platform is a game changing solution tailored to serve the needs of Pay TV service providers and subscribers, simplifying the complex problem of trying to find something to watch on TV regardless of source, linear, premium channels, or video-on-demand (VOD).

The Seamless Discovery platform transforms the content discovery experience from up-down-left-right surfing of today's electronic program guide (EPG) grid to an easy, personalized experience that pushes relevant content to the subscriber through search and recommendations features. This transformative experience is enabled by complex data management, algorithmic and business process innovations within the engine that powers the Seamless Discovery platform. Pay TV service providers can build applications on top of this platform to serve up a personalized, prioritized group of content that can draw from multiple content sources available to the subscriber.

Seamless Discovery is innovative from a technical perspective in terms of the rich application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable customization of search results and recommendations as well as the implementation of business rules, and the utilization of scene-level, time-based metadata from Digitalsmiths, its partner's data, subscriber data and other third-party metadata providers. The rich API makes it simple to integrate into a service provider's infrastructure. Applications can easily be built for unmanaged handheld devices like smart phones, tablets as well as for managed set top boxes and home media gateways, using either HTML5 or native programming.

"Digitalsmiths' Seamless Discovery platform is designed around the recognition that a personalized, cross-catalog discovery experience is now central to a pay TV service provider's brand and competitive differentiation," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager Avni Rambhia. "By nudging consumers out of the box of their habitually watched channels and empowering them to find relevant, enjoyable content from their service provider's linear and on demand offerings, Digitalsmiths helps subscribers always find something interesting to watch on television."

Personalized content discovery ensures continued subscriber engagement and loyalty for their pay TV service – it also encourages video on demand (VOD) purchases and upgrades for access to new, premium channels. Therefore, it is not surprising Digitalsmiths' solution was favorably received by all classes of pay TV service providers in North America, from Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) to satellite direct-to-home (DTH) and Tier I, II and III cable providers. The company recently announced customer wins with Time Warner Cable and Univision (for its popular UVideos service) and is also powering the content discovery for Nintendo's new Wii U console.

"Digitalsmiths is honored to be recognized by Frost & Sullivan for our efforts in personalized content discovery," said Ben Weinberger, CEO and co-found of Digitalsmiths. "Digitalsmiths is committed to delivering content discovery solutions that meet the challenges pay TV providers struggle with each and every day."

Seamless Discovery is equally innovative from a user experience perspective, drawing on an understanding of subscriber needs that are typically obvious only in hindsight. Whether the subscriber is in lean-forward mode (interacting actively with a device) or in lean-back mode (just relaxing and flipping through content), the platform is designed for varying discovery needs and to help the subscriber find content of immediate interest, which they can then access or purchase seamlessly.

When a subscriber searches for a movie by title, theme or person, Seamless Discovery is capable of combing through all sources – including the linear, premium channels, VOD, and other online services where the subscriber has an account. By eliminating the hassle of manually checking multiple sources of content, and through its fundamentally strong discovery capabilities, Seamless Discovery provides a single go-to point to find something to watch. Subscribers are responding favorably to the value offered by the platform and the accuracy of its recommendations –in fact, within its first year of deployment, Seamless Discovery witnessed its transaction volume grow tenfold, crossing the 1 billion transactions per month mark in January 2013.

Another key aspect of product quality is uptime and availability. With much of the service based in the cloud, this is a critical consideration. "The best search results, recommendations, and business rules logic is meaningless if the service is down when a subscriber is looking for something interesting to purchase and/or watch," noted Rambhia. Digitalsmiths backs up its discovery platform with solid disaster recovery capability and redundancy to ensure industry-standard uptime levels. This reliability and scalability, in addition to its search and recommendations capabilities and business-centric value proposition, all combined to distinguish Seamless Discovery clearly from other competitors in the personalized content discovery market.

Each year, Frost & Sullivan evaluates all key companies in a given market, and presents this award to the company that demonstrates innovation in product features and functionalities, resulting in enhanced quality and higher value to customers. The award recognizes the rapid acceptance such innovation finds in the marketplace.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Digitalsmiths

Guided by the belief that consumers should not have to work to find relevant content—the content should find them—Digitalsmiths provides the industry's most comprehensive video discovery platform, offering personalized search, recommendations and browsing, social trending, mood-based discovery, and a business rules engine for all connected devices. Built for service providers, content providers and consumer electronics manufacturers, Digitalsmiths Seamless Discovery® enables personalized discovery experiences that instantly connect consumers to the most relevant movies, TV shows and live events available, at any time, on any screen.

Digitalsmiths serves customers across all media channels and devices including Time Warner Cable, Cisco, Warner Bros., Paramount, Technicolor, Univision, Turner Sports, the NBA, the PGA, NASCAR, and i.TV. Digitalsmiths is privately held and backed by .406 Ventures, Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures, Cisco and Technicolor.

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan