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.

ThinkAnalytics, a search and recommendation company that works with a range of MVPDs and OTT video providers, has hired Rob Sowers to senior vice president of sales, where he’ll head up the company’s expansion and business development efforts for North America.  

Sowers spent nearly five years at Digitalsmiths, the search and recommendations company acquired by TiVo in 2014. He is also late of Netopia and Gomez.  

RELATED: TiVo Buys Digitalsmiths for $135M  

Via the move, Sowers will be reunited with recently named ThinkAnalytics CEO Gabriel Berger, who previously was with Vubiquity and Digitalsmiths.  

“Personalization is at the heart of pay-TV/OTT service providers’ initiatives to reduce churn and optimize new content bundles,” Sowers said in a statement. “ThinkAnalytics’ core technology platform and investments in AI-based predictive analytics is perfectly aligned with the market’s aggressive movement toward real-time, data-driven decision making.”  

ThinkAnalytics works with more than 70 video service providers, including Cox Communications, Liberty Global, Rogers Communications, Sky, Swisscom, Singtel, Vodafone and KPN, and claims to serve up more than 2 billion recommendations per day.  

ThinkAnalytics, a search and recommendation specialist for MVPDs and OTT video providers, has tapped Gabriel Berger as CEO.

Berger, to be based out of ThinkAnalytics’ Los Angeles office, most recently was EVP, sales and operations, at Vubiquity, which recently merged with Amdocs. Before that, he was SVP sales at Digitalsmiths, a search and recommendation startup that was acquired by TiVo in 2014.

RELATED: Why Amdocs is Buying Vubiquity

ThinkAnalytics said Berger is on board to lead its “next growth phase,” noting that its platform currently serves more than 2 billion recommendations each day, and has 200 million subscribers under license.

The company said it added 14 new customers in 2017. Its announced partners include Cox Communications (for the first version of its Contour TV app), Liberty Global, Rogers Communications, Sky, Swisscom, Singtel, Vodafone and KPN.

“ThinkAnalytics is a technology powerhouse in the TV search, recommendations and viewer analytics space and a natural fit for my experience and skill set,” Berger said in a statement. “I’m fascinated by the intersection of artificial intelligence and big data within entertainment and the need for actionable analytics that allow pay-TV and OTT players to fully engage with their customers and monetize their content as the battle for eyeballs intensifies.”

ColorTV, the company beind a marketing platform for broadcasters and connected TVs, has inke da deal to acquire Guidebox, a company that provides OTT video search technology for connected platforms such as Roku and Apple TV and for and clients such as Synacor, WWE, Lionsgate, and Ericsson.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but Guidebox will operate under the “Guidebox by ColorTV” label and enable search for other platforms that include Amazon Fire TV, Googel Home and iOS and Android.

Founded in 2012, Guidebox started with a $350,000 investment from founder and CEO Jeremy Riney, and later obtained a seed round from investors that included Facebook cofounder Andrew McCollum.

ColorTV will use Guidebox to beef up its analytics and content promotion platform for connected TVs.

ColorTV raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Foxconn last year.

In a move that signals bigger video-facing ambitions, Spotify this week announced it has acquired MightyTV, a startup that has developed a content recommendation system.

As a result, Brian Adams, founder and CEO of MightyTV, is joining Spotify as VP of technology, where he’ll focus on advertising and marketing technology platforms. Spotify reasoned that Adams’s expertise in programmatic advertising and personalized recommendations will help Spotify further develop its own ad products and its marketing technology platform.

“The content recommendation system MightyTV has built is incredibly aligned with how we think about advertising technology and marketing personalization,” Jason Richman, VP of product at Spotify, said in a statement. “Brian and his team will help us continue to innovate on free monetization and extend our leadership position in programmatic audio.”

RELATED: Starz Connects With Spotify

Spotify launched programmatic audio advertising on a global basis last year, with partners such as AppNexus, Rubicon Project and The Trade Desk, that lets advertisers target audiences by age, gender, genres and playlists.

Adams also founded Admeld, a publisher monetization platform that was created in 2007 and sold to Google in 2011. He ran the DoubleClick Publisher Platform at Google before starting up MightyTV in 2015.

Spotify said the MightyTV team will be based in Spotify’s New York City, Toronto and Stockholm offices.

After the deal was announced, MightyTV noted on its web site that its app will no longer be updated or available, but that the company is “excited about the road ahead.”

Spotify didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. MightyTV had raised over $4 million, according to CrunchBase.

Though Spotify’s business centers on subscription and free, ad-based music services, the company should be viewed through the lens of a “platform” that can support multiple media types, according to BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield.

“Platforms have direct relationships with consumers, put the consumer first as they built their businesses and continuously utilize robust amounts of data to improve/adjust their strategy,” Greenfield wrote in a recent blog post (registration required) about why Spotify should make for an attractive acquisition target for media companies. “Stop thinking about Spotify as a music service and start thinking about it as a media platform that simply started with music, but has the potential to be so much more.”

Spotify started to delve deeper into the video world in 2015 when it announced an expansion into video, initially by offering clips and other short-form video from partners such as ESPN, ABC, NBC and Turner.

Hulu said it acquired the assets of The Video Genome Project, a data base that will improve the streaming video company’s recommendation engine. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Video Genome Project has a granular, structured database of video content that uses hundreds of contextual attributes from metadata to deliver more insightful and relevant recommendation to the viewer. The data will be combined with Hulu’s current recommendation technology.

RELATED: Next TV SF: Hulu Says Give Us 90 Seconds

"The future of television is not just going to be about where and how you watch, it’s going to be about how personal your viewing experience can be,” Ben Smith, head of experience at Hulu, said in a statement. “With this strategic acquisition of The VGP’s technology, we’re gaining important data and personalization capabilities that will allow us to serve our users even better as we expand into live programming.”

Hulu says that 75% of its viewing is driven by recommendations.

Read more at B&C.

Shomi, the subscription VOD joint venture of Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, has selected ThinkAnalytics for a personalized search and recommendation engine as part of a plan to drive usage across the multiscreen offering.

Shomi will use ThinkAnalytics’s platform to complement and enhance shomie's existing recommendation/curation system that uses hand-picked titles.

The new engine shows personalized recommendations by learning about subscribers’ behavior and previous viewing preferences. Its “you will love,” “you may like,” and “more where that came from” picks integrate editorial selections, mood-based analysis, and results from multiple use cases, such as binge viewing, they said. Shomi supports both English and Canadian French.

The platform is running across shomi’s various platforms, which include set-top boxes, Web browsers, smartphones and tablets, Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles, the PlayStation 4, and Apple TV (via AirPlay).

“After reviewing the products available, we knew, based on their leadership in the market, proven track record, and positive customer references, ThinkAnalytics would enable us to take shomi to the next level of consumer experience,” said Ann Tebo, shomi’s senior director, customer experience & insights, in a statement.

Shomi, which competes in the market with Netflix and CraveTV and costs C$8.99 per month, launched across Canada in August 2015.

Shomi has not announced subscriber totals, but recently released some other data points – 17,698 episodes available to stream, 118 total series available, and 143 million total video plays. Adam Sandler and Shailene Woodley are the service’s most-searched actor and actress.

Fan TV, the video search and recommendation system that spans sources such as Hulu, Crackle, Netflix and live TV, has launched an app for Android devices, complementing its original launch on iOS.

The app also adds titles to a user’s WatchList if not available currently available through one of the supported OTT or TV platforms.

Fan TV (a.k.a. Fanhatttan), acquired by Rovi last year for $12 million,  said it will also offer its platform on Android TV devices such as the Nexus Player “in the near future.”

Time Warner Cable, meanwhile, continues to offer live and on-demand services on the Fan TV platform via the TWC TV app. TWC subs can still buy the Fan TV box and remote control for $149.