TV Guide

Media Company’s Fast, Relevant Internet Video Search Drives Business

TV Guide took advantage of the growing interest in online video content by creating a new service for end-users to search primarily professionally produced video content through a video guide at www.video.tvguide.com. It chose Enterprise Search, an integrated part of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 that delivers fast, accurate results and a pleasant browsing experience to drive customer loyalty and to increase advertising revenue.

 

Business Needs

TV Guide, a subsidiary of Gemstar-TV Guide, provides entertainment guidance to consumers through print and online products, like the weekly TV Guide magazine, and its Web site, www.tvguide.com. In 2006, its Web site went through a major site redesign. As part of that initiative, executives decided to introduce a new online video guide that would take advantage of the growing interest in Internet video content. The new site would differentiate itself from other guidance services by promoting only professionally produced video output from TV networks and entertainment producers that are TV Guide’s partners.

Our value to the search market and to our customers was to deliver fast and accurate results within the context of TV entertainment and we used Enterprise Search to deliver that value. Edgar Fereira Vice President, Engineering and Technology, Digital Media Division, TV Guide

“We saw this new service as a strategic move that would position TV Guide as the premier broker for end users to find this kind of content,” says Edgar Fereira, Vice President, Engineering and Technology, Digital Media Division, TV Guide. “Of course, an efficient search tool that delivers relevant results would be key to the success of this site, and would separate us from the YouTube or Google type of experience. If you search for ‘Lost’ on Google or YouTube, for example, you will get millions of irrelevant results because the word is so generic. We wanted to provide a more relevant search experience for users who are only looking for videos relating to TV shows, TV celebrities, movies, or movie celebrities.”

Fereira and his team needed a fast, relevant search tool for the new site, www.video.tvguide.com that would also integrate with the underlying IT infrastructure of www.tvguide.com. “We wanted to provide solid, reliable guidance to relevant information around TV shows and network entertainment via a pleasant browsing experience where people don’t have to wade through lots of irrelevant results,” says Fereira. “Our other main goal was that the search solution be easily managed.”

Solution

Fereira was already working with Microsoft Services to deploy Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for content management on the new Web site. In the process of that discussion, Fereira evaluated Enterprise Search, an integrated part of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

“Office SharePoint Server 2007 gave us all the functional value that we wanted: speed, relevancy, compatibility with our Microsoft-centric environment, and manageability, and it had a built in search tool. It was an obvious choice for us,” says Fereira.

Working with Microsoft Services, the TV Guide team built the online video guide to integrate seamlessly with www.tvguide.com and configured Enterprise Search to crawl the video repository. They used the Business Data Catalog, a new business integration feature, to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database of more than 100,000 videos that TV Guide acquires from partners through RSS feeds and other processes. The videos are already tagged with metadata, however, TV Guide Online refines the metadata and takes advantage of Enterprise Search free text queries and relevance algorithms to prioritize content in a way that makes sense within the context of professionally produced entertainment. For example, a word like “House” would bring up the TV show ahead of other, more generic results. “Relevance algorithms in Office SharePoint Server 2007 were key to configuring our search to deliver specifically what our site visitors want,” says Pritpal Singh, Technical Consultant, TV Guide.

Searching for “House” instantly retrieves hundreds of episodes and video clips, with multiple clips available for viewing on a single page. Hovering the mouse over a clip activates a popup window with all the details behind the video. If a user clicks play, he or she is redirected to the distributor’s site to view the video. 

Benefits

TV Guide co-launched a beta version of the online video guide with Microsoft in April 2007 at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). “With very little promotion, the traffic fully meets our expectations,” says Fereira. “Our value to the search market and to our customers was to deliver fast and accurate results within the context of TV entertainment and we used Enterprise Search to deliver that value. Our recent test results indicate that we can handle approximately 100,000 mouse fly overs a day.”

The key to the site’s success, and its potential, is the accuracy of the search results. “The better the search, the more the site will be used,” confirms Fereira. “This is fundamental to our business model, where we can demonstrate to our advertisers and our network partners that people are looking at the site and coming back for more. We expect Enterprise Search to drive our revenue because it’s fast, accurate, and relevant compared to other popular Internet video search tools.”

At the NAB launch, visitors to the TV Guide booth could perform search comparisons for popular videos using Enterprise Search and Google. In almost every case, visitors got more relevant results on the first page using the Enterprise Search tool.

“With Enterprise Search and how we have architected the solution, we are confident that our search solution can handle Internet traffic after the beta period,” says Fereira. “We are very pleased with our early findings in throughput and performance.”

And for TV Guide IT staffers, it will be easy to add more servers as necessary. With Enterprise Search, the propagation of an index across a farm of servers is automatic, compared with TV Guide’s incumbent search solution.

Concludes Fereira: “Enterprise Search is easily manageable, and it delivers the search experience we need to drive customer loyalty to TV Guide—and that translates into advertising revenue. We are off to a great start.”