Jinni, the maker of a new kind of “semantic” video guide that spans television, tablets, smart phones and the Web, has signed content distributors Time Warner Cable and Vudu among seven new licensees on four continents.It replaces old grid-style video guides with a new intuitive, personalized user experience. The company’s new “natural language understanding” (NLU) discovery engine supports voice-activated video guides that understand natural human language.
The Jinni NLU engine leverages the company’s “Entertainment Genome” to interpret natural human speech and derives the underlying meaning to enable intuitive interaction between users and their TVs.
Users will be able to simply tell their TV what they are in the mood to watch and Jinni will find the most fitting content from live TV, VOD and any other available video catalogue.
“Consumer demand has changed dramatically and today people expect to be able to interact with technology in a very natural, personalized way,” said Yosi Glock, Jinni’s co-founder and CEO. “This is the core belief that inspired our semantic approach to video discovery and has allowed us to bring such an advanced NLU solution to market so quickly.”
In addition to cable TV giant Time Warner Cable and online video provider Vudu, a Walmart company, the group of new licensees include major French mobile, ISP and IPTV company, Bouygues Telecom (part of the Bouygues Group) and Nordic Pay TV provider C More Entertainment, formerly operating under the banner CANAL+. Also listed are SingTel, the foremost media group in Asia and the largest Pay TV provider in Africa, South Africa’s Multichoice.
Jinni’s genome contains thousands of genes that are assigned to each title to describe mood, style, plot and setting. Jinni said it is a rich alternative to the usual genre language, which benefits both the quality of the content delivered as well as the intuitive semantic-based user experience. New titles are automatically indexed via analysis of user reviews and synopses, using a proprietary Natural Language Processing solution.
Jinni’s content discovery solution was voted “Best Product Idea” by CableLabs.
