Media Distillery Launches Search And Discovery Suite

Media Distillery, the leading AI technology provider in video user experience (UX) optimization, announces the launch of a new suite of capabilities focused squarely on accelerating the time it takes a viewer a discover appealing content.

The new Search and Discovery Suite from Media Distillery enables viewers to find desirable content faster, using the power of AI. Viewers enjoy superior search and content discovery experiences by leveraging Media Distillery's semantic understanding of video content. The system's deep insight enables it to surface results that are better, both in terms of quantity and relevance, compared to alternative solutions. The user is presented with an exceptionally wide and diverse range of content to consider, all related to their specific interest. Media Distillery's unique technology can provide the real-time broadcast content analysis, across all available content sources and types.

"2025 is the year of search and discovery," says Roland Sars, Co-founder and CEO of Media Distillery. "Viewers have so much content to choose from, sometimes they can't see the forest for the trees. An abundance of choice can make deciding what to watch difficult, even overwhelming, and might well result in the viewer simply giving up and switching off."
Decision fatigue, spending too much time unsuccessfully searching, leads to frustration, which in turn can lead to churn.
2024 research from Media Distillery's partner Gracenote entitled "State of Play" found that consumers facing overwhelming content choice at any given moment spend over 10 minutes on average deciding what to watch, with as many as 20% deciding to watch nothing. "These are sobering numbers, and spotlights the serious churn risk if the viewer gets unsatisfying search results," observes Sars.
Operators, broadcasters and OTT providers all face many challenges in today's complex and competitive market. One of the most important KPIs for video platforms is the amount of time users spend with it. To achieve successful metrics here, quality of user experience and the ability to help people find attractive content are critical. Service providers need to accelerate the time it takes the viewer to find, access and watch appealing content.
Viewers need a fast and easy content discovery experience that enables them to find all relevant content, including snackable video, just as quickly and easily as they could on YouTube or TikTok. Traditional search and discovery technologies have not kept pace with this diversity of viewing paradigms. "Simply presenting the viewer with many swim lanes full of linear TV content or VOD assets under the headings ‘because you watched XYZ' or ‘other people are watching this' is no longer sufficient to meet the elevated expectations of today's viewers,'" Sars adds.
An initial user test of the Search and Discovery Suite with a major cable operator delivered astonishing results: in the study, which centred on sports content, over 75% of participants declared this technology lets them watch sports content they would otherwise not have found. Over 65% declared that with the Search and Discovery Suite, they were presented with more sports content within the TV platform, material that they'd otherwise be searching for on other platforms. "These results illustrate the Suite's direct contribution to increased viewing time," said Sars.

This ability to deeply parse and surface content from across multiple sources is a novel opportunity to keep viewers engaged within the platform rather than looking for these items elsewhere. The Suite automatically generates metadata to ensure more search results can be offered to the viewer, even for live broadcasts natively devoid of metadata.

For an example, say the user is looking for content on the Academy Awards; Search and Discovery Suite can automatically populate the UI with Oscar-winning movies, but also TV series starring the winning actors. In addition, it can automatically surface related content from linear TV channels, such as ceremony highlights, red carpet appearances, award-winner interviews and other feature material related to the actors or directors. 

Video platforms offering live TV and catchup have expansive inventories of programs and this content reservoir is topped up daily. But viewers often can't easily discover interesting content. This prevents those broadcasters and service providers from monetizing the content in their platform to its full potential.

Leveraging the latest advancements in generative AI such as Large Language Models, (LLMs), Visual Language Models (VLMs), semantic search and content embeddings, the Suite supports dynamic generation of content descriptions for snippets of broadcast content and library content to give viewers all the information they need to help them decide what to watch. This elevated discovery opportunity gives broadcasters and streamers the opportunity to maximize the value of catch-up and replay TV, and of their asset libraries.

The capabilities of the Search and Discovery Suite complement those enabled by the company's recently announced Preview Distillery™ solution.

At Connected TV Summit 2025 (11-12 March, 155 Bishopsgate, London), Roland Sars will feature on a panel entitled "Using apps, devices and UX to deepen engagement" on Wednesday, March 12,12.25 PM.

www.mediadistillery.com