Kaltura, the leading video technology provider, announced today that it is evolving its Cloud TV technology and enabling capabilities to meet the requirements of an upcoming new epoch in digital entertainment – the era of Cognitive TV.

Having built the most widely deployed Cloud TV service in the world, delivering to over 40 million users the best features of pay-TV and OTT in a single cloud-native platform, Kaltura’s widely acknowledged Cloud TV expertise is now set to take Cloud TV into its next phase.

“Cloud TV has experienced an evolution, and we believe the next, third-generation phase, that of Cognitive TV, is beckoning,” said Gideon Gilboa, Kaltura Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing, Media and Telecom.

“For the past two years, we’ve been integrating data into multiple areas of our platform with our award-winning Targeted TV solution; this is where the Cognitive TV era was ignited, with TV meeting data in a meaningful way for the first time,”

“We’ve laid the right plumbing and groundwork for the next generation of Cloud TV systems, so now we’re looking ahead, building towards an era in which consumers get the services they truly desire, while giving service providers all the necessary tools to succeed over the long term in a fiercely competitive media marketplace,” he added.

What is Cognitive TV?

Cognitive TV is the next step in Cloud TV’s evolution, a widely anticipated era in which TV services are ‘conscious’, and capable of deep learning to enable new classes of experiences for viewers.

To make Cognitive TV a reality, vendors will have to construct a new layer of TV service intelligence in the cloud: Kaltura describes this as the “architecture” of the new Cognitive TV era.

“Cloud TV platforms will be infused with AI and deep learning for every aspect of a service from video quality, video curation and monetization all the way to the end user experience.

Furthermore, the infrastructure will need to be interoperable with external systems like voice, proximity detection and it will need to enable real time experimentation,” said Gilboa.

Said Kedar Mohite, Principal Consultant, Media Technology, Ovum: “These third-generation TV and video services will require the union of multi-facet data types, with AI as the fuel; the result will be super-smart, cognitive services for viewers, comprising vertically integrated Cloud TV offerings at scale as the backbone.”

The resultant Cognitive TV infrastructure will take TV service business possibilities to a whole new level for media and telecom providers, and the act of watching TV will be redefined.

“For instance, devices will be more than just multiscreen, they’ll be aware of each other and of context, to create an omni-screen experience, but this is just one capability which will characterize the upcoming Cognitive TV reality,” said Gilboa.

The vision is of a TV service that learns, and all the vast array of content choices and features are elegantly woven and conveyed in an intuitive UX which anticipates what the user wants to do next.

“With Cognitive TV, many of the limitations on how users interact with their TV service today are removed; hitherto disparate content silos are harmonized, viewers interact in a natural way, conversationally, with their TV services, and search and recommendation are, at last, finely tuned and meaningful to each user and to groups of users for shared TV experiences,” Gilboa explained.

“In just a few short years TV will be a very different experience for users and operators; we will look back at this point in TV history and clearly see the start of the Cognitive TV era, a time where Cloud TV and AI started to converge,” 

“At Kaltura, we are committed to creating the world’s most powerful TV services and capabilities by gathering together peerless cloud, AI, ML, data and UX technology and expertise to make Cognitive TV a reality. We welcome IBC 2019 delegates to visit us and see a glimpse of what Cognitive TV might look like in the early 2020s.”

About Kaltura

Kaltura’s mission is to power any video experience. A recognized leader in Cloud TV, EdVP (Education Video Platform) and EVP (Enterprise Video Platform) markets, Kaltura has emerged as the fastest growing video platform with the broadest use cases and appeal. Kaltura’s Media and Telecom business unit helps telcos and content owners make the transition to a full-fledged Cloud TV service that satisfies the exacting demands of today’s TV viewers. The Kaltura TV Platform features personalized multiscreen access to linear, VOD and time-shifted TV as well as third-party content. It combines advanced monetization options with the ability to scale to millions of viewers anywhere in the world. The adaptability and agility of the Kaltura TV Platform means that companies can experiment with new products and features, analyze performance, and react quickly to changes in viewing behavior in order to optimize engagement and better achieve business goals. www.kaltura.com