Keep viewers in front of the TV longer with vTap Web Video Services for Television

Industry experts peg web video viewings at more than 500 million — a day. But it’s all happening on the PC. That gives you some idea of how consumers now divide their time between the two major home content outlets: the PC and the TV.

Smart Cable TV, Telco TV and IPTV providers know that adapting their services to support shifts in consumer behavior is the key to maintaining subscriber levels. That means finding a way to offer web video access via the tube. Done right, it’s a real opportunity to add a significant portion of the web video viewing time to the TV since the actual viewing experience on today’s sophisticated TV screens is far preferable to watching motion footage on a PC.
 
Two major obstacles in the road to convergence
The problem to date has been the limited text input capabilities of TV remote controls and the rudimentary functionality of set-top boxes. Although Internet access itself is easily made available to subscribers, the fundamentals of a positive user experience – the ability to quickly search and browse the vast libraries of web videos available online using just the TV remote– simply isn’t widely available. As a result, television service providers are reluctant to include web video service as part of their offerings for fear of delivering a “half-way there” experience that disappoints users and potentially loses their trust and their business.

A second problem has been one of format. Web videos can be encoded using a variety of formats that may or may not be compatible with the capabilities of the TV set-top-box.

vTap makes finding web videos on TV even easier than on a PC
vTap’s unique character-based incremental search solution makes it easy to cherry-pick web videos off the Internet using the very limited data entry capabilities of remote controls. This is because the user only has to enter a few characters as opposed to entire keywords. vTap’s advanced algorithms not only extrapolate the information necessary to find the desired video with just a few characters, they can also learn user preferences during each search. As times goes on with personalization, vTap starts anticipating queries based on previous requests until web video searches become virtually effortless.

How it works
Easily integrated into common video delivery network platforms, Veveo leverages your existing capital and technological investments.

There are two components to Veveo’s vTap web video service: a thin-client embedded in the set-top box and a behind-the-scenes Veveo Search Complex hosted by Veveo.

The key to the power of vTap is the Veveo Search Complex, that is hosted by Veveo. Using advanced proprietary web-crawling techniques and algorithms, the web is crawled with specific focus on identifying links to the videos embedded in web pages. Only the most relevant metadata corresponding to the videos is identified from the web pages containing these videos. This metadata is then correlated with relevant metadata from other sources. The metadata and relevance metrics associated the web videos are then used to create a web video search index that is used by our unique proprietary search algorithms that employ new-to-the-world computer science techniques and complex mathematical concepts.

When a subscriber enters a few characters into the remote, the thin-client in the set-top box beams the query to the Veveo Search Complex where algorithms mentioned above quickly pull results and organize them. The results are sent back to the thin-client that then converts them for display on the television screen.

In addition to helping users discover the web videos of their interest, the Veveo Search Complex also ensures the device requesting the video receives it in a format that is compatible with that device.

The thin-client is compact and can easily be ported to a variety of set-top-box platforms. In addition, a solution based on set-top-box web technologies can also be provided in cases where a resident client on the set-top-box is not feasible.

Request an in-person demo today
Ready to give your customers the widest access to web videos possible? Ready to stave off attrition, grow subscription revenues and drive incremental advertising sales? Get started by requesting an in-person demo. Contact us today sales@veveo.net and we’ll show you how vTap will help you grow subscriber and advertising revenues while preparing your company for the future of entertainment viewing.

Custom Solutions
In addition to vTap, Veveo can create a custom discovery solution that enables customers to easily search and browse your TV listings, VOD catalog, DVR content, etc. Contact us at sales@veveo.net to discuss.