Live Session
Session 16: Multimedia Recommendation
Industry
Personalised Recommendations for the BBC iPlayer: Initial approach and current challenges
Benjamin R. Clark (British Broadcasting Corporation), Kristine Grivcova (British Broadcasting Corporation), Polina Proutskova (British Broadcasting Corporation) and Duncan M. Walker (British Broadcasting Corporation)
Abstract
BBC iPlayer is one of the most important digital products of the BBC, offering live and on-demand television for audiences in the UK with over 10 million weekly active users. The BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster, broadcasting over traditional linear channels as well as online presents a number of challenges for a recommender system. In addition to having substantially different objectives to a commercial service, we show that the diverse content offered by the BBC including news and sport, factual, drama and live events lead to a catalogue with a diversity of consumption patterns, depending on genre. Our research shows that simple models represent strong baselines in this system. We discuss our initial attempts to improve upon these baselines, and conclude with our current challenges.