Semantically enhanced smart data, combined with analytics, can provide powerful business marketing tools for video distributors according to Spideo. In its white paper, “How Smart is your Data? the video recommendation engine provider explores several areas in which semantically enhanced smart data opens up new business opportunities and demonstrates the impact recommendation engines have on user experiences.

The white paper also establishes an industry standard for measuring the performance of these recommendations, which include:

Transformation rate – the ratio between content watched after a recommendation and the total number of watched content.

Engagement rate – the measurement of the impact of recommendation not just in terms of overall viewings but also on wider interactions such as clicks on trailers and ratings.

Exposure rate – the ratio between the number of titles watched by users and the number of titles available in a catalog.

Conversion rate – the measurement of how recommendations drive users from a free content watching behavior to a paying content watching behaviour.

“These analysis tools were born out of the fact that video operators cannot accurately evaluate the performance and quality of a recommendation engine with only one indicator,” said Thibault d’Orso, Spideo co-founder and COO. “When it comes to business intelligence, many experts talk about big data as if quality or performance were essentially a matter of quantity. This is not true. Intelligence does not accidentally come out of large volumes of data. Only smart data makes a big difference. We want to help educate the industry on some of the factors that should be taken into account when designing search and recommendation platforms to help the industry evolve as consumers continue to consume more and more content through VOD services.”

The paper also explores the added value of semantically enhanced technologies in collecting huge amounts of data about users’ behaviours and content properties, such as making more personalised suggestions and significantly improving the exposure rate of content provider catalogues.

Content owners using Spideo’s platform include Canal+, M-Go, Bouygues Telecom and Arte.