ZEE5 taps XroadMedia for personalisation

Indian streamer ZEE5 has tapped search and recommendation specialist XroadMedia to enhance personalisation of its video-on-demand offerings and social media services.

ZEE5 will put to use XroadMedia’s back-end solution, Ncanto, to provide content discovery, recommendations and personalization to its users.

XroadMedia’s technology will also be deployed to scale up HiPi, ZEE5’s new short-form-video platform. Since HiPi’s beta launch in August, ZEE5 says it has seen 30 million new user installs along with 70 million existing ZEE5 users upgrading to the platform.

First launched in India in July, Ncanto provides personalisation of ZEE5’s services based on interests and watching behaviour.

ZEE5 is also using Piloto, XroadMedia’s advanced business and service management tool.

XroadMedia’s cloud-based solution encompasses a mix of statistical, editorial and user-based recommendations.
“ZEE5 has always believed in the power of great content and powerful technology coming together to offer the best experience to a viewer. We are potentially the only player in the country, and possibly in the world, to be working towards hyper-personalization for ‘The segment of ONE’. We believe gone are the days of broadcast; even the current trend of viewing audiences in clusters and cohorts will soon give way to individual personalization. And this is where XroadMedia comes in. We have benchmarked their solution for a few months and found adoption and click-through-rates on recommendations were significantly higher along with a substantial increase in average time spent by a user. XroadMedia’s cloud-based services have also provided us with a higher level of flexibility to serve personalization use-cases and I’m confident this partnership will heighten our seamless content viewing experience, a feat we take great pride in and work tirelessly to maintain,” said Rajneel Kumar, business head – expansion projects and head of products, ZEE5.
“Our partnership with ZEE5 is another major milestone in the history of XroadMedia and proves the progress we have made over the past few years. We are particularly excited to work with ZEE5 as they are using our solution to its full extend – from personalizing entire screens in the user interface via creating and managing editorial services to applying our solution across multiple content types and sources. We are very pleased with this partnership, as the application of our solution shows how important personalisation is to ZEE5 and I am sure together we will push the boundaries of content discovery and personalization even further in the future,” said Adolf Proidl, co-founder and CEO of XroadMedia.