How Crackle Counters Discovery Search Fatigue
Learn more about the OTT user experience at Streaming Media East 2022.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Ryan Ford: SVOD and AVOD have traditionally been experiences that are centered around a user picking an individual title to watch. Be it a movie or some sort of episodic content, whereas live and linear are largely a service that you might be able to flip channels, so to speak. But in essence, it's playlist material. It's the service deciding what's on right now. And so the user has different expectations from that. Again, SVOD and AVOD versus live and linear. And I think there's an aspect of those differences. That's really exciting to explore from a product experience perspective. And I'm hopeful that we can get to a point like that at some point in the near future for Crackle. But in the immediate term, Crackle is all about AVOD. And Thomas was putting it very succinctly and accurately earlier when he was talking about AVOD being a different animal than SVOD.
SVOD, no commercials. It's great in that way. But then the challenge for the user becomes, "How do I find something worth watching?" And again, with Google's expertise, as well as Netflix and their whole algorithm, which they're very famous for, you can surface content that you believe is more contextually relevant to the user. But even then there is a challenge of, of the noise factor, which I think we're gonna talk about a little bit later, but something that I think we've all experienced is many of these services are taking sophisticated shots in the dark, so to speak. So instead of saying, "Here's the one thing that we really know you're gonna wanna watch," we say, "Here's a list of things that we're guessing you might like to watch based on your historical viewing experiences."
On one hand, that's incredibly sophisticated and very exciting to do. On the other hand, it still creates a lot of noise, a lot of discovery search fatigue. And instead of going to search and typing in a thing you want, you're now sort of in a position where you're having to dig through a feed of content, whether or not it's been curated for you, it's still a feed of noisy content. So I'm really looking forward to a future where our services can get even more sophisticated and actually drill down, narrow down into recommending for the user, the one, or maybe just few things that it knows that user is going to be really excited about watching.
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