Opening a connected television (CTV) interface presents a unique challenge for someone who is looking to turn on their TV for a lazy session of viewing. With several visual boxes on-screen, all with varying logos or screengrabs showcasing what can be consumed, taking the first steps to viewing content over CTV is a lot like opening the menu at The Cheesecake Factory — more choices than one person can fully process.

The litany of streaming platforms, channels and applications available across the CTV ecosystem is growing every day and with good reason. Insider Intelligence forecasts that CTV households will hit 115.1 million by next year — more than doubling traditional pay TV households. The transition from traditional TV viewing to streaming over internet-connected television has arrived.

All of this underscores that the time for streamers and publishers to get their content in front of viewers is now. But, there’s a challenge that lies at the core of this mandate, and every other new frontier with services jockeying for their share of the market: discoverability.

Streaming Choice Overload

Just as many consumers express extreme overwhelm when sitting down to select a meal from The Cheesecake Factory’s famously expansive menu, the approaching ubiquity of CTV interfaces often leads to choice overload — a specific type of indecision born out of having too many choices. 

CTV comes with an incredible number of options among advertising-based video on demand (AVOD), subscription-based video on demand (SVOD), and free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels. Hulu, Disney Plus, Samsung TV Plus, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Peacock are just a handful of the streaming apps available, and we’re seeing more FAST channels — from names like Amazon and Comcast — launch every day.

For the average consumer, these choices are more or less indistinguishable from one another. Making a decision about which platform to subscribe to or which app to download and test often has to do with which options are presented on-screen most prominently. Otherwise, viewers who know exactly what they want to watch and where to watch it will choose their streaming option accordingly — though this is less often the case than a user who turns on the TV without a specific agenda hoping to be pleasantly surprised. And, even if one is familiar with their CTV interface, being creatures of habit, there’s often little room to connect with users who might consider a new streaming service — free or not.

This challenge of discoverability is not unique. The job of a marketer is to cut through the noise to find new customers who are likely to purchase a product again and again. Similarly for content distributors, finding viewers likely to enjoy their specific library of content, enticing them to download or open the corresponding app and encouraging them to return to watch content on a regular basis is the million-dollar question the streaming ecosystem has in front of it.

Not-so-distant industry history provides a glimpse of how this might play out. Performance-based marketing solutions revolutionized customer acquisition for the web and mobile apps. From this point forward, the same approach to data-driven targeting and measurement has the potential to effectively transform streaming advertising.

Understanding Content Is Key

A first requirement of getting in front of the right viewers is for the technology to truly learn and understand your content. Are you a FAST channel focused on live sports, a publisher centered around local news, a streamer with a myriad of programming across genres or in some other niche? Once the technology knows your content, it can then pave a better path to finding — with compounding effectiveness — the user profiles most likely to download and engage with your content library. Like any performance marketing effort, the goal becomes to acquire new viewers at such an effective rate that the cost of spending on advertising becomes revenue positive.

Solving the discoverability challenge clearly stands as the next frontier in assisting viewers to find their way through the comprehensive CTV menu. Imagine a future state where content distributors advertising their streaming services and content can swiftly find and actively promote to the most high-value viewers. The increasingly positive outcomes, both in terms of volume and efficiency, would begin to speak for themselves.

fuboTV, the sports-focused OTT TV service, said it is introducing a new home page with new discovery features ahead of World Cup 2018, the global soccer tourney that kicks off this Thursday (June 14) when ost Russia takes on Saudi Arabia in group action.

RELATED: Comcast Brings World Cup Content Hub to X1

The new discovery capability is designed to highlight tournament fixtures as well as other sporting events piped in from channels on fuboTV’s lineup, including CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW, alongside entertainment and news programming.

RELATED: U.S., Latin American Networks Tap CenturyLink for Live World Cup Feeds

The updated home page will include “blended” content that spans those different programming areas, rather than just sports content.

A new “Featured” section provides a fuboTV-curated view based on popularity among sports, series and movies, While Recommendations will be tallied based on viewing history. That personalization element will be offered to each user profile within a subscription (fuboTV’s baseline service offers two simultaneous streams and the ability to purchase an additional stream) in the “coming months,” the service noted.

DENVER — Linear TV isn’t dead, but the ability to search for and find relevant live TV content has historically been limited by the technology underpinning older on-screen guides and the use of static metadata such as a show’s title and baseline description.

In an effort to help viewers discover and surface relevant content from multiple live sources, a unit of Comcast has been hard at work at a smarter search platform that can collect and present clips on specific topics that are powered by deep metadata that’s pulled from the contents of the video itself.

The result can remove friction from finding linear TV content and also help viewers discover programs and content from channels that they perhaps were not even aware of, Chris Lintz, senior principal architect for Comcast’s VIPER team, said here Thursday at SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo on a panel session titled “Enhancing the Interactive Experience.”

Read More: Complete Coverage of Cable-Tec Expo 2017

VIPER (Video IP Engineering & Research) is a unit of Comcast that designs and develops IP video solutions that support products such as X1, the company’s cloud DVR, and apps for mobile devices.

“We don’t have to be bound by the traditional guide and search on static metadata,” Lintz said. “There’s a gap in linear content discovery.”

The system being developed would let a viewer input a query into the platform (i.e., “Donald Trump and health care” or “Amazon and Whole Foods”), which, in turn would engage in a continuous, real-time program dialogue search and video analysis search engine that would look at individual components such as shots and scenes.

When a match is made, the data would be sent to a notification service and a recording would be scheduled based on that information. Results could include video clips from programming that the customer is entitled to as part of their subscription and also list of content that they aren’t entitled to, but maybe could be if they added that programming to their pay package.

In addition to assembling those clips into the DVR, the system could also be made to send alerts to the viewer on their mobile devices when a clip on the query topic is available for viewing.

Lintz said the system is about two years in the making. “Doing real-time search is hard,” he stressed, noting that the VIPER team has some ideas on how to include an alerts feature that doesn’t overwhelm the customer.

Comcast hasn’t announced when it might turn the project into a commercial product. “It’s a real system in our lab,” Lintz said.

Though VIPER has had this under development for some time, some of that work appears to stem from Comcast’s acquisition earlier this year of Watchwith, a video tech firm that had built a deep video metadata system that can decipher what’s happening inside a move, TV show or sporting event on a frame-by-frame basis.

Prior to acquiring Watchwith and its technology, Comcast was using the company’s technology for some relatively new features for its X1 service, including “Auto-Extend,” which automatically extends DVR recordings of sporting events that go beyond their scheduled airtimes, and a sports highlight component that auto-creates metadata tags that let viewers jump directly to key plays or moments in a sporting event that’s recorded to the DVR