Walmart’s Vudu service has finally introduced Jinni’s search and discovery system into its user interface for all Vudu users.
Jinni announced that Vudu was a customer at the beginning of this year, along with Time Warner Cable, Bouygues Telecom, C More Entertainment (formerly Canal+), Prisa, and SingTel.
Jinni takes what it calls a semantic approach to categorizing content. The result, the company claims, is the ability to provide mood-based search and taste-based recommendations, leading to a higher level of personalization.
Jinni, like many other search and discovery specialists, goes beyond those obvious categories; it says it characterizes content by mood, style, plot, setting and more.
Netflix, for example, has created highly sophisticated algorithms for its search and discovery process, categorizing movies not only by actors, directors, and genres, but also by any number of other characteristics. But Netflix viewers are still generally limited to searching by top level categories such as title, actor, genre.
Jinni also differentiates itself from Netflix by pointing out that its categorization process is automated while Netflix uses a manual tagging process.
The challenge appears to be finding clients who agree that giving viewers more search options is a useful thing to do.
Vudu is adding features that other services, such as Hulu, introduced some time ago, such as creating a page that displays all the shows any particular viewer is still in the middle of watching, and automatically queueing up the next installment of episodic content.
Vudu, with Jinni, is going further than many other video services by letting viewers select sub-genres (action comedies, buddy comedies, etc.), or all movies by plot (heros, romance, time travel, etc.), or mood, or years (the ‘30s, the ‘70s, etc.)
Yosi Glick, Jinni Co-Founder & CEO added, “We are proud to have a customer like VUDU adopt our solution using our full discovery feature set. This is further validation of our semantic approach we have built over the years which has now become the dominant trend by the leading players.”