Isn’t Everything Personalized Yet?

The company of which I’m CEO, Linius Technologies (ASX:LNU) has some pretty amazing video technology, and one of the things we often talk about is that everything on the Internet, except for video, has been personalised. The personallzation of your own TV channel is one of the things we enable, and we’re the only ones that can do it. At a macro-level, this is true — but there is so much more to be personalised at the micro level. This week, Gracenote (a subsidiary of venerable TV-viewership-statistics company Nielsen) announced “personalised imagery”. Think about the images you see when you log into Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or whatever. Today, those images are the same for everyone on the service. But Gracenote’s new product let’s them be tailored to you and your interests. And, as wither personalization everywhere else, it works. “A recent pilot by a top-five U.S. streaming service that used targeted Gracenote program images instead of standard images resulted in an 11.2% increase in time spent watching titles and a 7.7% lift in the number of titles watched.” The interesting thing here isn’t so much this minor new personalization. It’s how much impact a little thing like this can have, and, really, how little of the world is actually personalised so far. We’re going to see dozens if not hundreds of more examples of this in the coming decade, and it’s a  great place to watch in the start-up world.

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