Broadband TV News speaks with Tom Dvorak, CCO at the leading content discovery and recommendations company XroadMedia.
When was XroadMedia established and what have been the main highlights in the company’s history to date?
We founded XroadMedia in 2012, when we spun out a team of Philips Electronics that was researching and developing content discovery and recommendation solutions for video services. Since then, XroadMedia had substantial year-on-year growth in size and revenues. Today we have more than 50 deployments live with broadcasters and service providers – such as A1 Telekom Austria Group, Televisa, Starhub and ZEE5 – where we power content discovery and personalisation for more than 200 million users.
What are XroadMedia’s products and the benefits they bring to your customers?
At XroadMedia we offer a complete solution for content discovery, recommendations, personalisation and data analytics. Unlike traditional recommendation vendors, we provide our customers with an easy-to-integrate yet versatile solution that helps them to boost their KPIs and optimise their users’ journey within their services. Our integration requires very little resources, even so that we can offer our customers a test-integration into their own products and services for them to experience the benefits we bring to the table. During those trial implementations we can quickly show how our solution turns free users into paying customers, decreases customer churn, increases customer satisfaction rates or boosts any other KPI relevant for their business case. This approach has proven extremely powerful to not only convince customers about the power of our solution but also on how easy it can – and should – be to optimise business results and boost success.
How do you account for XroadMedia’s success and the fact it has had no customer churn since its launch? What do you do differently to your competitors?
We are a very passionate team that deeply cares about both, our core product and our customers. While we focus our development efforts on continuously innovating and further enhancing our core solution, we also work closely with and listen to the needs of our customers. It is common for us to develop intermediate versions of our software with features and functionalities relevant for a particular customer project or an upcoming industry trend – in addition to our ongoing SW development and roadmap activities of course. This means our customers can rollout new features, use cases, innovations, etc. as fast as possible. The result speaks for itself, in almost 9 years in business we have never had a customer moving away from our service to another. We are very proud of this fact.
Is XroadMedia currently developing any new products and services?
We are constantly evolving our solution and add new features, functionalities, use cases and applications multiple times a year. Today our solution is used for use cases ranging from search, via content discovery, recommendation and personalisation to targeted advertising, or addressable TV as it is also known. Currently we are working closely with some of our customers on how to improve their user experience and communication with users outside of the traditional TV service through personalisation. A good example is our work with ZEE5’s HiPi service, a Tik-Tok-like service in India, where ZEE5 takes advantage of our solution for a social media service centred around user generated content. Finally, we are also developing new services and use cases based on 3rd-party data source integrations to help our customers to further maximise their business benefits.
How do you see XroadMedia evolving in the next few years? What are the company’s plans for the future?
Given the growth rate of our business we are very optimistic about the future of XroadMedia. We have grown from nothing to one of the major players in personalisation over the past few years – and today we are serving more than 200 million users with our solution. We believe this is mainly because we are working closely with innovative customers and are adding new projects almost on a monthly basis. But we also see great potential in the area of personalisation in general and the business impact it can have for our customers. This is why we keep developing new use cases and applications for our software to drive our customers’ businesses and help users enjoy the services and content they offer.
For further details about XroadMedia, please go to https://www.xroadmedia.com
