ThinkAnalytics said it named Jo Kinsella as strategic adviser, advertising.

Kinsella was a founder of TVSquared, and left after it was acquired last year by Innovid.

“Jo is a passionate and accomplished leader with a strong track record in revenue growth and defining go-to-market strategies to drive scale,” ThinkAnalytics chairman Eddie Young said. “We are thrilled to have Jo on board, someone who has proven success in the TV advertising industry and knows that ThinkAdvertising is a differentiator across all TV platforms, delivering the digital advertising we all know from the web to the world of TV.”

ThinkAnalytics offers artificial intelligence-based personalized content discovery and viewer analytics. Its products include the ThinkAdvertising platform. 

“ThinkAdvertising has something everyone in the industry needs,“ Kinsella said. “With its powerful Al and global viewership data, ThinkAnalytics transforms first-party data into valuable and scalable audiences while helping to identify inventory value and minimize ad waste. I look forward to helping drive the next stage of ThinkAdvertising’s growth and build on its incredible momentum within the TV market.”

Vendors ThinkAnalytics and Firstlight Media announced a partnership to combine their respective technologies to deliver search and recommendation products to pay TV and OTT service operators.

Toronto-based Firstlight Media will combine its content management system (CMS) with London-based ThinkAnalytics’ cloud native content delivery platform. The result, the two companies say, will be a personalized viewing experience that combines human-created editorial with AI-powered recommendations.

The partnership is being touted at the virtual IBC Show, which kicks off Tuesday. 

The new partners didn’t announce any clients for the venture. ThinkAnalytics said it delivers content discovery and viewer insights to over 80 video service providers serving 350 million users in 43 languages with 6 billion recommendations per day. Customers include HBO Latin America, DirecTV Latin America, Liberty Global, Rogers, BBC, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Proximus, Sky, Astro, Singtel and Tata Sky.

“The nirvana of personalization is knowing not only the ‘what’ in the viewer’s decision-making process but also the ‘why,’” said Andre Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Firstlight Media. “The combination of ThinkAnalytics’ suite of tools and our own real-time personalization capabilities will turbocharge our customers’ ability to gain deeper, more actionable insights into content that’s coming—and content that was missed—that matters to the viewer.”

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.”

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.

Jinni said it is powering the discovery engine that is humming behind a new user interface launched by VUDU, the Walmart-owned multiscreen electronic sell-through and rental company.

Jinni’s involvement continues an existing relationship it has with VUDU, as Jinni announced that the Walmart unit agreed to license Jinni's mood-based video-discovery platform back in January 2013.

Jinni’s semantic discovery platform is present on VUDU’s updates across its range of supported devices, including connected TVs, gaming consoles, Web browsers, streaming players, and Blu-ray players. That will help VUDU’s customers discovery content amid a library  that offers more than 100,000 titles to rent or own.

Yosi Glick, Jinni Co-Founder & CEO added, “We are proud to have a customer like VUDU adopt our solution using our full discovery feature set. This is further validation of our semantic approach we have built over the years which has now become the dominant trend by the leading players,” company co-founder and CEO Yosi Glick said, in a statement.

Jinni also has deals in place with AT&T for its U-verse TV service, Comcast (for its X1 platform), Belgium’s Belgacom, Spain’s Prisa, Singapore’s SingTel, and Canada’s Telus, among others.

Jinni competes with other media discovery and recommendation engine suppliers, including Digitalsmiths (now part of TiVo), ThinkAnalytics, and ContentWise.

Of that group, ContentWise, which counts Mediaset, Sky and TIM Brasil as customers, announced Tuesday that sales have jumped 400% in 2014. 

Britain’s Sky has stitched in a recommendations engine from ThinkAnalytics to  Sky+, its electronic program guide.

The new feature pumps out suggestions of TV shows and movies that a customer might enjoy based on recent recordings and downloads in their Sky+ Planner.

The recommendation engine is one of several new features that have been baked into the guide.

Sky TV has also added Smart Series Link, a component that remembers to record the next season and all subsequent ones after that. A new Sports tile has been added to the Homepage, providing direct access to all the live sporting events that are currently showing on any channel. 

Sky said its new software update is rolling out to customers now, and will be available to over 8 million customers with compatible Sky+HD boxes by the winter.

Sky said about 40% of all homes in Ireland and the U.K.  have a direct relationship with the company through its range of TV, broadband and home telephony services, and that more than 30 million people watch Sky content each week.