Removing the Friction of Content Discovery On CTV
Today’s streaming providers deliver endless amounts of content, which can overwhelm viewers who are simply looking for something to watch. The content discovery process often takes far longer than viewers are willing to wait. FAST channels have the power to redefine content discoverability by using data to serve customers the content they want to watch and to help them find new content based on prior viewing habits. FAST platforms have a vast amount of data available to them, but only a small amount of it is being used to its full potential. Incorporating viewership data into the content discoverability process can remove the pain points that have bubbled up in the new streaming landscape, lead to more engagement with the content, and open up more opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences.
The need for a seamless, premium viewing experience across all devices has never been more critical; both mobile and traditional TV screens will continue to play significant roles in the future of content consumption.
“Content discovery, curation, and what we do as both viewers and programmers are serious issues” in today’s CTV ecosystem, says Chris Pfaff, CEO of Chris Pfaff Tech Media. “And content discoverability remains a big challenge."
This article will explore how a range of content, media, and tech companies are addressing the challenges of content discovery and the strategies and emerging tech they’re deploying in the ongoing efforts to reduce and eliminate the pain points that continue to plague the content discovery experience for CTV and OTT consumers.
It's Not All AI: The Human Factor in Content Creation
The general drift of industry buzz over the last 18–24 months would be likely to convince even the most skeptical observer that all of the smart money is on AI when it comes to hyper-personalizing the content discovery experience, and it’s time for humans to get out of the way and accept defeat. But not every content company is giving up on humans having a role to play in curating consumer content choices—at least not yet.
“We really lean into the idea of humans curating for humans,” says Katrina Kowalski, Pluto TV’s SVP of international content programming and acquisitions. “We have teams—local teams—in all of our regions that are scheduling and curating content for their local markets, which to us is really meaningful. I think they know best what is relevant in their markets because they are closest to the cultural zeitgeist in their market. At the same time, these teams are not only content aficionados—they’re deeply versed in all of the data and all of the consumption.”
To Monica Williams, SVP of digital products and operations for NBCUniversal’s content distribution business, the commingling of “art and science” in content curation is critical. Williams memorably told Streaming Media in a July/August 2024 interview that “metadata is my jam.” But on a broader level for NBCUniversal as a publisher, she says, “We’re leaning into enriched metadata because we recognize the importance of the algorithmic science portion and being able to tap into that. But there’s also the human piece. We really do believe in the art and the science: the human and the machine working together. A lot of this goes back to ways that we can help unburden our partners to be able to provide the best experience in their device or on their platform. And whether it’s the human curation or algorithm recommendation, we’re covering both.”
Williams says that when it comes to content discovery and providing a curated consumer experience, the key question to ask is, “What can we do to provide the most descriptive metadata around our content? Because I’m also coming from a distribution product POV, I believe our job is very consumer- centric in terms of how we make this experience better for the end viewer. Viewers shouldn’t even have to think about discovery. We all want to find a way to make it easier, and the viewer’s main job is to watch content. So how do we get them into watching content as fast and as easy as possible? What are the things that we can do to work with our distribution and platform partners to make that easier and provide a seamless experience?”
Revry, a “don’t-call-it-a-niche” producer, curator, aggregator, and network serving targeted LGBTQ+ content for a global streaming and FAST audience, partners with major platforms like Samsung and Peacock but faces many of the same challenges other independents contend with when it comes to gaining visibility in an increasingly crowded content—and content discovery—marketplace. “The thing that we’re looking for,” says Chris Rodriguez, Revry’s chief content officer, “is being featured via editorial moments. Their success is our success. So, the better that they are at being able to target either individual pieces of content or channels like ours, the better for us as well.”
88 Million Samsung TV Viewers Can't Be Wrong
With Samsung TV Plus recently surpassing 88 million monthly active viewers, there’s growing concern that CTV is consolidating around a few major players and that FAST and other content providers will need to play nice with the major operating systems and other platforms to maintain their visibility and discoverability. “How do you compete against a device manufacturer when you need them to help you with the discovery process?” muses Pfaff.
Kowalski insists—like Rodriguez does with Revry—that Pluto TV’s relationship with the likes of Samsung TV is not a competitive one, so the lat- ter’s seemingly unchecked growth doesn’t pose any sort of existential threat. “We look at it more as partnering with them,” she says. “It’s undeni- able that they’ve got a really competitive advantage in terms of being deeply integrated into the living room. And we’ve had a lot of success distributing channels to Samsung TV Plus. The success of discoverability in general is that you need to have a really strong distribution network, whether it’s where your app is or where your channels are. And I don’t think it stops there. You certainly need an amazing product. You also need marketing more broadly outside of the connected TV zone only because it’s actually quite expensive. If you cast a wider net on web or mobile, I still think that you can entice people to come to connected TV.”
Partnering to Avoid the Content Development Arms Race
Revry’s Rodriguez agrees that discovery has never been about going it alone and standing out by producing copious quantities of original content; it’s also about leveraging strategic partnerships. “The discovery of Revry was actually achieved through partnerships with all of the emerging FAST networks. We were an early partner of Pluto in 2017, and that’s how we got our feet wet in this space. One of the biggest, most appealing things early on was the fact that we didn’t have to play the content arms race that Netflix was perpetuating, which we couldn’t do. We couldn’t afford all this content, but on FAST, we didn’t have to because there are only 24 hours in a day, so you really just have to fill your daytime programmingwith something that’s compelling. So, we were really drawn to it, and then we saw the emergence of a lot of other networks. Of course, we are expanding and marketing direct-to-consumer, but we’ve actually subsisted largely over the past several years on just marketing within the CTV environments and riding the coattails of a lot of these bigger mainstream platforms that are carrying our channels.”
Reaching Gen Z and the Power of Podcasting
Gatsby Frimpong is CEO and co-founder of Gatsby TV, an emerging AI-driven content-finding app that’s designed to bring “all your streaming services into one place where they can be easily searched and combines what you’re viewing on each one into a unique recommendation algorithm.” It incorporates suggestions of family and friends and thus intends to bridge “the gap between our screens and social lives.” To Frimpong, gaining a leg up in CTV content discovery is not just about gaining visibility on TV sets. It means making sure your content is discoverable on all of the platforms where viewers consume content. And for Gen Z and other younger-skewing demographics, that means the range of mobile devices found under the iOS and Android umbrellas.
“In terms of CTV, we try to be available on each and every single device,” Frimpong says. “From a technology standpoint, this is extremely difficult, dealing with different environments. At the end of the day, one of the things that we’re trying to do is make sure that our users have a pervasive and ubiqitous experience, whether it’s on mobile, on TV, or on their laptop, because the majority of media content isn’t being consumed on the TV—it’s being consumed on the phone. So, we have a very specific emphasis on making sure that we’re available there. Our CTV folks are going to be the Android phone makers and Apple iOS as our CTV.”
While most of the content that younger viewers are watching is UGC and TikTok, for TV-centric content providers to reach that demographic, they need to pay more attention to the type of content those viewers are watching and the devices they’re watching it on. This means delivering short-form content that hits its mark with those viewers and plays and achieves visibility on smartphones and tablets.
“What we’re seeing is that Millennials and Gen Zs are on their phones watching 7 hours a day on TikTok and these types of things,” says Frimpong. “For the traditional providers, one of the things that they need to be looking at is having short-form content. It’s quite a lot to ask someone to watch one thing for 30 minutes at a time. These short-form providers are providing [30-second clips], but somehow end up getting 30 minutes of your time. And that’s quite interesting.”
Frimpong sees an even broader shift in the type of content that bubbles up as different sorts of me- dia increasingly take precedence. And that’s something, he argues, that “traditional” media providers need to respond to. “The longtail is actually now becoming the shorttail,” he contends. “There are people talking about podcasts like Call Her Daddy, Joe Rogan, etc. These used to be niche, but now they’re in the mainstream. Being able to give people those sorts of things and then other things that are similar to that takes them from not only being longtail to shorttail and takes you from grabbing 30 seconds of their time to 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours of time. That’s where the industry is going.”
Revry’s Rodriguez agrees on the value of paying attention to podcasting and its value for content discovery strategy—at least to a point. “For promotion and marketing, I think they’re great. We’re plotting a release of our first true-scripted long-form original at the beginning of the year, and working with existing podcast networks is part of that strategy,” Rodriguez says. “We’re also releasing miniseries or side-series that I think could help promote it. Early on in the company, we created a podcast network. We had Revry Podcast pretty early on, and we had some good talent within our community, and they were relatively successful. But at least from a FAST perspective, they didn’t really work. Visually, it just wasn’t super-compelling content.”
Pluto TV’s Kowalski largely concurs with Rodriguez on the value of podcasts raising a company’s content profile on the marketing side but not neces- sarily working on their own as marketable TV-type content. “We’ve found quite a lot of success marketing on audio platforms,” she says. “But it needs to be compelling from a visual perspective. There are a lot of really terrific podcasts out there that have really animated, recognizable hosts that I think people would watch. There are a couple of football players right now who’ve got a tremendous podcast. There’s definitely opportunity, but we would need to make it so that it’s appealing both audio and visually.”
Diving Deeper Into Consumer Viewing Behavior
Regardless of the method used to try to reach viewers by promoting content they’ll like and making it visible and readily accessible, the es- sential challenge, according to Chris Pfaff, is recognizing patterns in their past viewing behavior and using that recognition to anticipate their next moves. “We’re all trying to grapple with the issue of what people watch, how they watch, when they watch it, and how shifts [in viewing behavior] occur,” Pfaff says, “through sentiment analysis and things like that.”
It’s often about deepening that analysis, Pfaff argues, looking beyond the shows viewers choose to the elements of the shows that draw them in. “We’re looking at when people are most interested in watching and looking at even the heuristics of content itself—‘Oh, there’s the car chase at the 62nd minute or whatever.’ ” But are content companies currently pursuing such deep-dive explorations “to enable the discovery side,” helping viewers get more quickly to watching TV shows “rather than going through the carousel for 20 minutes?”
Gatsby TV believes that homing in on consumers’ viewing desires might be simpler than Pfaff suggests, maintaining that in-the-moment mood has proven a better indicator of viewing preference than past behavior. “One of the things that we’ve been looking at from an AI perspective is recommending [shows] based on mood,” Frimpong says. “In the research that we’ve done, the word ‘mood’ came up every single time. So instead of rec- ommending things based on what you’ve watched historically, or if you want something in a specific genre, we ask, ‘What mood are you in today?’ And that’s how we decide what we want to show you as a user. In order to do that, we’ve had to use natural- language processing across 600,000 different movies and TV shows to figure out what TV shows or movies solicit specific moods.”
Revry’s Rodriguez says that mood-based discovery recommendations have been part of the AVOD world for some time, although the enabling tech has improved considerably. “Early on at Revry,” he says, “we were part of a think tank with a group of other niche streamers. There was a company called Blue Fever, and mood-based viewing was something that they were really pushing. They used to actually text their subscribers and ask them how they were feeling, and that’s how they suggested content.”
Kowalski says that Pluto TV also relies on mood as a what-to-watch weather vane. “I do think people pick programs based on how they want to feel,” she says. “Do they want to laugh? Do they want to cry? Do they want to learn something? FAST over-indexes in several of the key need states, including things like comfort or togetherness. Do they want to watch a movie? Do they want to be immersed in a paranormal series? These are things that you might not have discovered before. So, I really believe in this area and understanding how people engage.”
“We’ve done a lot of research around what actually is going on in the moment when a viewer is trying to choose content,” says NBCUniversal’s Williams. “And what we found is interesting. Simultaneously, the viewer is anticipating how they expect to feel, what they expect to see, and does that match with the mood and what they’re feeling?”
It’s one thing, Williams explains, for a recommendation engine to build a personalized channel around past viewing data, but that doesn’t neces- sarily take into account the headspace the viewer is in at a given moment. “Context plays a huge role. You could build the Monica Williams channel,” she says, based on similarities to what she’s watched and preferences she’s expressed before, “but that Monica Williams channel is going to look different on a Monday morning versus a Friday evening be- cause of different need states, what I’m expecting to do, and how I feel. It’s all going to play a role.”
All of these contextual factors and more are brought to bear in how NBCUniversal works to improve the discovery experience. “We think a lot about that, but for us, it’s also about making sure that we’re preserving the creative intent of the con- tent that’s representing our brand and really tie into the creative,” Williams explains. “We think about the metadata and how to make sure that you have the right structure to maintain that through this complex ecosystem and ultimately make it to the viewer. So, that’s all part of our day-to-day consideration.”
Maximizing Hot Zones and High-Traffic Areas
One of the key nuts-and-bolts issues in content management that arguably has an outsized impact on discovery is making effective use of “hot zones” and “high-traffic areas,” the prominent and public-facing regions of an EPG where viewers are likely to land first or most often, and populating them with the right featured content.
At Pluto TV, Kowalski says, “We have carousels, we have featured sections for our EPG, and then of course on the VOD side, we’re making sure to cu- rate rails that feature things that we want people to notice first. Another reason why having a broad of- fering is so important is, maybe I want to laugh, but I don’t want to watch Cheers. I want to watch a different kind of comedy, like FailArmy, for instance. So, it’s really important to have as broad an offering of all of the genres as possible, because it’s not one size fits all. How you anticipate feeling when you’re watching something isn’t necessarily how somebody else will anticipate feeling when they watch it. So, even if you think about the tagging behind the
But too much content can also be an inhibiting factor. Not only is content saturation arguably the most talked-about issue in recitations of streaming’s content discovery woes; it also can make it difficult for good content to find its audience when it’s crowded out or obscured by other content with easier access to visibility.
“We’re living in this world where there can be an amazing hit-quality show that is just loved by the people, by their fans, and it does not reach the success parameters of the network, and it gets canceled,” Rodriguez says. “We hear that all the time, and actually we hear it all the time with regard to content that tends to be genre or niche. For example, LGBTQ people within our community are always in upheaval over the cancellation of some show that they love, like Dead Boys Club or the Queer as Folk reboot. The problem is that these things disappear into the ether, and they never get a chance to find their audience.”
But opportunities are improving, Rodriguez says, as niche providers gain more visibility for targeted content. “I love what’s happening right now where people are loosening the strings and allowing these things to live in other places where they could potentially find their audience. At the end of the day, Netflix still owns that show. If they were to license it to us and it was a huge hit, they could totally pull it back and then be like, “You can only watch it on Netflix.” But at the end of the day, it made us a little money. It got us a little viewership, and it builds value for the brand. So, I’m hoping to see that more in the future.”
Ultimately, whether it’s about the content finding an audience or the audience finding the content, it all relates to the experiences viewers have when they go looking for shows to watch. So, most efforts to address the friction in content discovery, Williams argues, should have the common goal of delivering better experiences. “Content discovery is the problem, but we should really think about the content experience in a broader view,” she says. “How do we make this the best experience? The discovery part for the viewers should really be invisible if you do this the right way. In an ideal state, you’re getting them into the content they want in that moment by serving content that matches their anticipation of how they’re going to feel.”
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