Such observations arise when people in key positions peer beyond what’s currently happening in the TV space, as was the case during a panel at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 moderated by MediaLink Managing Director Matt Spiegel. Joining Spiegel were Tal Chalozin, CTO & Co-Founder of Innovid; Walt Horstman, SVP/GM Analytics & Advertising at TiVo; and James Shears, VP, Advertising at Sorenson Media.

“There will be a big emphasis on how do you actually tell a better story,” said Chalozin. “How do you respect user attention. This value exchange of allowing users to choose what experience they’re interested in.”

These elements won’t be optional. “All of those things will become table stakes and will be standard for every marketer on every platform,” Chalozin added.

Asked by Spiegel to outline the potential parameters of one-to-one interaction between viewers and what they are watching, Chalozin steered away from what a decade or so ago was standard thinking about so-called interactive TV.

“It won’t always be this I click on a sweater in order to buy that,” said Chalozin. “I don’t believe that people will actually transact on a television. You would save things for later. You would have some type of universal shopping cart and you can save it for later and it will be aggregated on your phone so you can check out.”

TiVo is headed down the road of advanced personalization to assist content discovery. In October of 2017, the company announced the availability of its VOX products, which facilitate entertainment-centric voice control and hyper-personalized viewing recommendations, Horstman explained.

“It’s all about natural language understanding,” he said. “Pick up the remote and say ‘what’s on TV tonight?’ And then based on your historic viewing and based on what we think you’re interested in based on a whole series of machine learning algorithms, we’ll make recommendations of what you should be watching.”

This gives rise to new ad products, including what Horstman termed “sponsored recommendations.” In addition, TiVo will offer sponsored videos. “You’ll be pulled into it as a consumer because we know enough about you through all of the analytics and all of the data that we’ve got. We’re not going to be doing interrupt-driven advertising. We’re going to pull them into an experience that they will get value out of.”

Meanwhile, Sorenson Media is out to create an entirely new ecosystem that does not rely on current infrastructure to provide live, addressable linear beginning in 2018. Its partnerships with TV manufacturers gives its automatic content recognition chip a front row seat to everything that happens behind the glass.

“The media player in the TV does actually take precedent over anything that’s happening, whether it’s through the MVPD or something else,” Shears said. “The bet really is about an ecosystem opportunity. It’s less about media sales and transactions. It’s actually about bringing people to the table to create an ecosystem that allows for a little more robust opportunity in addressable.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

Two of the company’s newest products are a measurement solution for local broadcasters and addressability for linear TV, according to VP of Advertising James Shears.

Using automatic content recognition, “We understand what’s on the screen and we can actually measure what people are doing on the TV,” Shears says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. “It’s not panel based, it’s not leveraging set-top box data. It’s just doing something that’s not been done in market before.”

Use cases for local broadcasters include informing their promotional activity and bringing insights to newscasts, both based on the entire life cycle of viewers. “During the newscast or local broadcast, did they leave the channel when a particular story was coming on or did they come back and stay and were heavily engaged? Maybe they need to push happier stories or do something they hadn’t really thought about.”

This represents a more holistic approach “where there has been a hunger for measurement that’s a little more informed and a little more second by second,” Shears says.

With addressable, Sorenson Media “takes out the traditional and starts understanding how you can leverage the digital ecosystem to do something that has been done in the linear TV side, but maybe not at the speed with which we can perform. The key for our platform is that we’re essentially creating an ecosystem.”

Because of everything it sees on TV screens, the company says it’s in a good position to “think about the stream itself” and improve viewers’ experiences. That could involve shrinking the 18 minutes of commercial time per hour and other ways “we can think about breaking the paradigm.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.