Broadband TV News speaks with Patrick Byrden, VP Business Development & Strategy, Xperi, about the company’s recent activities and plans for the future.
Patrick leads Xperi’s Business Development and Strategy function in EMEA.
He is focused on helping customers identify and implement video solutions based around content-centric user experiences which utilise best-in-class personalised discovery solutions. Patrick also works with Xperi’s CTO office and strategic partners to drive innovation on behalf of customers across multiple verticals.
Prior to Xperi Patrick held positions at BBC Worldwide, Red Bee Media, Ericsson and TiVo.
Xperi recently announced their acquisition of Vewd. What does this mean for both companies?
This is a great transaction all around. Vewd brings not only OTT and hybrid TV solutions, but their invaluable industry relationships with chip vendors, TV OEMs and content partners to our portfolio. This enhances the capabilities of our TiVo business to deliver superior end-to-end experiences for CE, operators and connected cars. The combination of TiVo video service platform and Vewd’s suite of streaming media solutions establishes Xperi as a leading independent streaming media platform for smart TVs, connected cars and video-to-home broadband operators.
Xperi also announced the launch of the TiVo OS. Can you tell us more about it?
TiVo OS is our independent media platform enabling OEMs to deliver extraordinary customer experiences to their branded smart TVs. This model brings a new content-first experience to the world of smart TVs in a way that seeks to allow OEMs to be ‘Powered by TiVo’ rather than requiring them to produce a ‘TiVo TV’. Many OEMs were already using Vewd’s smart TV components, so marrying these with the TiVo experience is a natural step forward. This will expand our global footprint by tens of millions of in-home devices, including those already supported by Vewd components.
Vestel is the first OEM partner for TiVo OS. Where will they market their TVs?
TiVo is proud of this partnership to deliver our “Powered by” experience across multiple brands and territories. Vestel will be sharing their full deployment plans later this year – stay tuned.
How significant is the Vewd OpX unified user experience expansion to Android TV set-top boxes?
For existing OpX customers, like Evoca, it presents the key opportunity to deploy their services on new devices while retaining a consistent user experience.
Can you tell us about TiVo Conversation Services? Are there rollout plans beyond Poland?
TiVo Conversation services is a component of the TiVo Personalised Content Discovery (PCD) platform. It enables viewers to search for the programming they want using natural language understanding (NLU) – in other words, “just say it and see it.” NLU is AI capable of understanding what you want to see, whether you say “What’s the latest film with Tom Cruise?” or “Show me the money,” and taps into the power of TiVo’s best-in-class metadata to deliver it.
Including Poland, we currently support 12 locales. Our expansion is driven by customer demand, but we’re definitely planning on rolling out more languages.
TiVo User Cold Start won the CSI Award for Best Interactive TV Technology or Application. How does it work?
Our content discovery team developed TiVo User Cold Start (UCS) to deliver personalised recommendations when viewers first land on the home screen. It’s a smart system that presents a user with two titles and a prompt to select a preference. Once that’s received, it progresses through additional pairs to maximise predictive intelligence for discerning user likes/dislikes and ultimately delivering a highly personalised experience. This results in measurable benefits – the UCS system reduces churn by 7 percent compared to non-personalised set-up experiences.
What is Xperi’s growth plan for the next 3-5 years?
In Q4 2022, the company will be splitting into two parts. The business focused on developing innovative products across the entertainment, advertising and automotive industries will retain the name Xperi. Our semiconductor, licensing and intellectual property business will be the focus of Adeia. For the foreseeable future, Xperi, through our TiVo brand, will continue to invent, develop and deploy superior solutions that help consumers find, watch and enjoy the content they love.
For more information about Xperi, please go to: https://xperi.com/
