Editorial curation and Rails Builder

OpenTV Video Platform enables the operator to promote content to end users via both manual and automated approaches:

• Recommendations
  OpenTV Video Platform embeds XroadMedia NCanto recommendation engine to profile consumers and to recommend content.
• Editorial curation
  OpenTV Video Platform enables operators to manually promote content into areas on the user experience (e.g., the magazine view in ION).

This enables a range of use-cases (at either API or ION level) for operators to promote and market content including:

• Content-to-content recommendations (e.g., watch next)
• User-to-content recommendations (e.g., Magazine view)
• Manually promoted lists of content (e.g., Halloween-themed content)
• Sorting of lists of content based on user recommendations profile (e.g., sort the catch up, from BBC, in order of what the user is most likely to want to watch)

Content is promoted via the Rails Builder tool in the Operator Console. This system is designed to operate without operational interaction and to build up a content catalogue that is automatically published based on metadata. The catalogue can be structured into the consumer experience by automatically or manually putting the content into "content groups" which can, in turn, be used in schedulable layouts made up of ‘"ails". Rails can be entirely automated (based on metadata, recommendations, last content shown on a channel, etc.) or can combine editorial decisions (e.g., promoting a big event or movie).