Trust Your Taste – Jinni Lets TV Viewers Enjoy Content on Their Own Terms

The company behind the first and only taste and mood based discovery engine for entertainment is introducing its new Jinni TV guide at CES 2012

LAS VEGAS & TEL AVIV--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jinni, the company behind the first and only taste-and-mood based discovery engine for movies and TV programming, is introducing its new Jinni TV guide during the 2012 International CES, held this week in Las Vegas. The user-centric TV platform, designed as an answer to the traditional program guide, offers new "effective social" features, while still upholding Jinni's primary focus on personalization, through user taste profiles and mood-based discovery powered by the Entertainment Genome™.

TV viewers today do not always know what they want to watch; they do not have a specific program or movie title in mind and eventually flip through channels searching for content that will fit their current mood and personal tastes. The Jinni guide assists by offering an intuitive content discovery solution, with two available areas, each representing a different approach to content discovery: The "Picks" area provides a true lean-back experience; this is the viewer's comfort zone, where titles from both the linear and VOD catalogs, which were pre-selected for him by the system based on his personal Taste Profile, are available to him for easy picking. The Jinni Taste Profile is uniquely created for every viewer and presents him, and his household, with a number of richly defined taste collections that were automatically created based on their specific watching habits and consumption history. For example, a user's Taste Profile can reflect his tendency towards clever stories about criminal heroes on one hand, and also towards content about cynical family relations on the other.

These recommendations (the Picks) can be viewed via a number of different menu options: (i) Taste – where the viewer can explore his taste collections and select content that will reflect his mood at that given moment; (ii) Live for Me – a smart feature that provides an easy answer to the basic question "what's airing right now that I would enjoy?", where Jinni scans the entire TV program guide for the next couple of hours and displays only the shows and movies that fit the user's Taste Profile; (iii) Neighbors – one of the many "effective social" options, where the viewer may explore what others, with similar Taste Profiles to his, are watching and recommending. This smart feature goes beyond standard sharing; it collects relevant profiles from connected networks and communities to feature only those that are relevant to the viewer.

The "Explore" area is a lean-forward experience where the viewer can intuitively explore and discover different types of available content according to his mood. This is Jinni's answer to random channel zapping and is one of the features supported by the Entertainment Genome™ which enables users to define and refine their content by mood, plot, audience, time period, and more. The endless flipping through VOD catalog pages of "Drama," "Action" or "Romance" is finally a thing of the past. With a Jinni guide the viewer can search as he thinks or speaks, by using natural metaphors; if he is in the mood for something funny, slightly cynical, with an underlying story about friendship that takes place in an urban environment – that is what he should be looking for. The Jinni guide will understand a search query for "funny and cynical friendship in the city." Additionally, if we take into consideration the direction that voice control technology is taking, it won't be long before the viewer will actually be able to "talk" to the TV set and say straight out exactly what it is he wishes to watch.

Jinni's answer to the popularly growing social trend is visible in several significant features: the "neighbors," which as previously mentioned allows an effective alternative to social content recommendations; a "watch together" feature that enables household members the option to define changing groups of viewers and receive recommendations accordingly (relevant by taste to all members of the group); and last but not least, the standard known social features, i.e. sharing, connecting with friends, viewing friends feeds and recommendations, etc.

About Jinni Media

Jinni is the first and only taste-and-mood based engine powering video discovery. Using content genetics and nuanced understanding of user tastes, the Jinni engine powers a uniquely intuitive, personalized experience that increases content consumption and reduces churn. The Jinni service is powered by the Entertainment Genome™, containing thousands of genes that are assigned to each title to describe mood, style, plot, setting and more; this is a rich alternative to the usual genre language. New titles are automatically indexed via analysis of user reviews and synopses, using a proprietary Natural Language Processing solution.

Jinni’s content discovery solution was voted “Best Product Idea” at CableLabs last year. Jinni is a Webby Awards honoree, a Red Herring 100 Europe winner, an OnHollywood 100 winner, a SXSW Web Awards nominee, a TechCrunch Europas nominee and was selected as the best movie recommendation engine by CNET and Lifehacker. To see Jinni's award winning engine at work, visit www.jinni.com.

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