It’s been a year since JW Recommendations launched and since then the product has been delivering millions of extra plays a day to publishers. This week’s release of Video Search Playlists and an enhanced web interface greatly improves our flexible & powerful content discovery solution.
Big Gains in 2016
Recommendations are a crucial part of many video publishers’ offerings and that has put a premium on simple and integrated solutions that can be delivered cost effectively at scale.
JW Recommendations integrates deeply with each part of JW Player to provide a powerful, real-time and automated content discovery solution built on our vast network of viewer and content data streams.
At the core of the JW Recommendations product are the three recommended playlists:
Our Trending Playlist captures viewer activity in real time to ensure that videos on their way to viral status are surfaced and promoted. Even when human editors haven’t spotted the uptick.
Our Similar Video Playlist chooses the best videos to complement what viewers are watching based on viewer activity and content metadata traits. This playlist powers our in-player recommendations solution and leverages viewing trends in the broader JW Network that 3rd party algorithms can’t uncover.
Our new Video Search Playlist matches a keyword search to your content library and presents the best results. This playlist provides a great experience for viewers who are looking for just the right video to watch in OTT, mobile, or our Showcase app.
Beautiful & Powerful Player Integration
The JW Player 7.7 release enhanced our Discovery overlay with a clean tile layout to beautifully present your content on any desktop or mobile browser. Our new recommendations engine lets you create Similar Video or Trending Playlists that are filtered by tag-based business rules, and then associate them with any player via our intuitive web based player builder.
Go ahead and create a content pool based on a genre or business structure (e.g. ‘sponsored’ content or ‘sports’ genre) and our Recommendations engine will suggest the optimal video content to increase viewer interaction and help you hit your business and content engagement KPIs. To further boost viewer engagement JW 7.7 ensures that videos previously viewed within a playback session are not recommended again.
Quantifiable Lift
We make sure you can verify the performance of recommended playlists with our Analytics Segmentation feature. You’ll find a quick view for 30 day trailing play counts on each playlist detail page, as well a link to go explore the data further. You can read more about the features of Segmentation here.
Flexible Access
The addition of Video Search playlists means that JW Recommendations covers more use cases across every platform, including OTT, mobile apps and contextual players. Reliable API access to recommended playlist content via JSON & RSS means increased engagement anywhere–even outside the player. We’re also building easy access to recommended content for our Apple TV and Showcase apps. Visit our Developer Site for some great implementation examples on how to take advantage of recommended playlists outside of the player.
Just the Beginning
In 2017 we’ll add new features to make it even easier to ingest content into our system as well as syndicate it out, we’ll help you intelligently drive more traffic to sponsored or valuable content and most importantly we’ll continue to improve on this powerful toolset for increasing viewer engagement. If you don’t have JW Recommendations yet contact your account representative!