Russia’s ivi Enhances Personalization of VOD Service

MOSCOW: The Russian VOD platform ivi is launching a personalized TV service that is meant to combine traditional television with a recommendation system.

The newly launched ivi tv is being touted as a "first-of-its-kind personalized TV service," which is based on and integrated into ivi's VOD platform. The service features such functionality as recommendation algorithms and the option to choose what to watch and when. There are several channels on ivi tv that are aggregated through a recommendations system for each individual user—they are updated on a daily basis, depending on the history of previously watched movies and programs. In addition to these personalized channels, ivi tv offers more than 40 genre channels that include more than 25,000 units of content, as well as special channels made by ivi tv's team of editors and include curated video content from the whole ivi library.

Oleg Tumanov, the founder and CEO of ivi, said: "TV hasn't undergone any fundamental changes in the last 50 years. And it has been doing exactly the same thing: broadcasting content to clients, not asking for any feedback from its users or providing any option to manage your own video stream. We decided to bring together the vast functionality of VOD and the easiness of traditional TV to provide a very effective solution for our users who at some point don't want to make a choice: they just want to turn on and watch."