Russia’s Ivi adds personalisation features

Oleg Tumanov

Russian video-on-demand service Ivi.ru is adding personalisation features in a bid to marry the functionality of VoD with the “easiness of traditional TV.”

Ivi said that the new Ivi TV personalised service will be deeply integrated into its VoD platform and was developed “after years of studying users’ preferences.”

Ivi TV will offer several tailored channels, aggregated through a recommendations system for each individual user, which will be updated on a daily basis. It will also offer more than 40 ‘genre channels’ and special channels created by Ivi TV’s team of editors.

“TV hasn’t undergone any fundamental changes in the last 50 years. It has been doing exactly the same thing: broadcasting content to clients, not asking for any feedback from its users or providing any option to manage your own video stream,” said Ivi founder and CEO, Oleg Tumanov.

“We decided to bring together the vast functionality of VoD and the easiness of traditional TV to provide a very effective solution for our users who at some point don’t want to make a choice: they just want to turn on and watch.”