Red Bee launches social media platform

Red Bee Media has launched a portfolio of content discovery solutions, based on the age of problem of consumers not being able to find anything they want to watch, no matter how many channels are available to them.

The first two clients are Veronica, the top-selling Dutch listings magazine and the what’s on guide Time Out.

“Increasingly we’re enriching the metadata with things like episodic images for a show, maybe a trailer if there’s a videoclip, and links to external sources of information, like a link to Wikipedia, IMDB, a show page on a broadcaster website and other sources of information,” explained Steve Plunket, director, technology and innovation, Red Bee Media.

Red Discover combines Red Bee Media’s established metadata build, sourcing and distribution services with search, recommendation and personalisation technologies, creative and user interface design and companion apps and ‘second screen’ experiences to enhance the user journey. This includes the ability to link to content on catch-up services.

Plunket says that with manufacturers beginning to open up their APIs it is possible to view information on a tablet and watch the selected content over a connected TV.

Last August Red Bee acquired the content discovery specialist TV Genius and a number of its technologies have been incorporated into Red Discover.

Veronica is launching a new tablet application, available on both the iPad and Android devices, which features showcase functionality including: the ability to ‘check in’ via Facebook and let friends know what you are watching, ‘like’ programmes and see what friends ‘like’; Twitter integration to see what programmes are trending in real time and interact with connections; and search, share, rate and recommend content across Facebook and Twitter.

“We’ve created a branded product for Veronica, which includes aspects of their own recommendations and editorial that we can then link with social media,” said Plunket.

The Time Out TV guide integrates the traditional TV listings with social networks, Facebook and Twitter, picking up on the buzz surrounding a particular show, both through the networks as a whole and using the readers own Facebook friends.

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