19 THE VOD FILES Content Discovery
watching. Or if it was a Friday night trying to find a movie I was like, ‘Let’s see what we have in Netflix. Okay, then let’s see what we have in Hulu’. It just seemed so antiquated and silly. And the problem just kept getting worse, with more and more services coming out. “It’s one of those classic stories. I thought someone else would solve it – it was such an obvious problem. I even waited a couple of years. Eventually it was clear that it was something I would have to do. I knew how to launch products from my time at Facebook and I saw that this was essentially a data problem. And that’s what ultimately led me to leave, and to start Reelgood.” had the right idea at the right time. Interest in the Reelgood solution has snowballed as both content companies and content distributors realise they have a mess on their hands without an overhaul in content discovery across platforms. “I think it’s just a little bit of history repeating itself. When TVs first came out, they had a knob with three channels on it and that was fine. You didn’t need anything more. But once cable came there were then hundreds of channels, and there needed to be a TV guide to navigate all of that. Well, now TV has moved to the internet, and when it was just Netflix that IT’S THE DATA, STUPID Sanderson feels very fortunate to have
WHEN TVS FIRST CAME OUT, THEY HAD A KNOB WITH THREE CHANNELS ON IT AND THAT WAS FINE. YOU DIDN’T NEED ANYTHINGMORE
was fine. But now we’re getting past the three channels and that same problem is coming about.” Since it was launched in 2015, the Reelgood platform has acquired tens of millions of users, says Sanderson, and after growing in the US it’s about to launch into Europe and South America, starting in the UK in early 2020. The growth of the service has been largely organic: Reelgood hasn’t spent any money on advertising. The company won the Webby award last year for best entertainment app. And Reelgood hasn’t just been a success with TV viewers. Technology companies, as well as the streaming platforms themselves, have come to the company for help. “A lot of the big TV manufacturers and other hardware devices in the market have come to us looking to get us on their platforms,” says Sanderson. “They see we have a working product that people really love and want to try and bring that to their
smart TVs or set-top boxes. That’s our next evolution – to be launching with those different manufacturers.” Reelgood’s attention to putting the user experience front and centre is one of the drivers of its success. The simplicity and clarity of the interface hides a lot of technical complexity. “If we’re doing our jobs right it’s not seen, but there is a very complicated back end that powers the whole thing. And largely that’s the matching of the data from all the different services. There could be a situation where Season 1 through Season 6 of a show is on Netflix, Season 7 is on Hulu, and Season 8 is on AMC because that’s the newest season. Well, Netflix and Hulu and AMC all have completely different IDs or identifiers for that show. What our system has to do, is to match all those together. Gathering the data isn’t hard, but matching the data is.” How Reelgood receives the catalogue data from the different streaming platforms
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