Our COO and co-founder of Spideo, Thibault D’Orso, was a speaker at NexTV Series CEE & DACH
which took place in Berlin on November 29-30th. He took part in the panel: “D2C Video on Demand
Challenges” alongside Martin Simka – Product and Project Manager at Showmax and Claire Hunter
Gregson – Commercial Director at Hopster. The main problem raised by the panel was:
“How are the newly launched players aiming at strengthening their position in a complex and
fast-moving market?”
Generally speaking, personalization and recommendation were very hot topics during these two days.
Other panelists such as Krzysztof Kaczurba – Director of Development Strategy at Orange Poland,
Karl Anton – TV & Multimedia Area Manager at Telia Estonia and Maciej Gozdowski – Managing
Director at Player PL pointed out that their main challenge today lies with personalization and finding
the best way to highlight, curate and promote content for their users.
As a personalization specialist, Thibault’s intervention was very timely and we wanted to share the
highlights here:
When personalization is represented by the simplistic “Recommended for you” or “Other customers
also bought”, it will be followed by dissatisfaction and frustration by users and operators.
Instead of comparing users with other users and clustering them into a rigid category that they
most likely will not relate to, we address each user taking into account their uniqueness and
identifying their very own complex and rich profile. For Spideo, an optimal personalization
experience resembles a human dialogue with the user.
In this dialogue, the users’ tastes and interests must be identified and named in order to explain
each recommendation. The effort put into explaining the origin of a recommendation betters
the engagement with content. Spideo’s main focus as a company has always been and will always
be to provide the users with three main key elements: TRUST, TRANSPARENCY and CONTROL.
At this stage of the discussion, GDPR had not even been evoked yet. Spideo has always been GDPR-
compliant and now, there is a regulation in Europe protecting users’ data privacy and encouraging
all operators to better their customer relationship. For those who fear that this regulation will
jeopardize personalization, rest assured: it’s a golden opportunity to work together and improve the
user experience, injecting transparency, trust and control at every step of the discovery.
Thank you Dataxis for inviting us to this great conference!
You’re looking for the next generation of GDPR-friendly personalization solutions for your video
platform? Contact us to schedule a meeting and a demo of Spideo.
Contact Thibault D’Orso: thibault@spideo.com / Sarah Rashidian: sarah@spideo.com