26 CONTENT FOR KIDS Safeguarding and Wellbeing
recommendations, as well as a monthly report emailed to parents on their child’s use of the platform and what educational material they were exposed to. Hopster uses both algorithms and human curation to drive its content recommendation. “We always make sure that we have a human content team. The data doesn’t make the final decisions, because the data can tell you what was popular yesterday, but it won’t tell you what is going to be popular tomorrow.” Hopster ’s data has revealed that its short-form content works best, as well as shorter content seasons. “We would not commission a series that has 52 episodes. That’s not what we need. We commission shorter series. The data informs our strategy. I don’t think even the big players have solved the content recommendation purely with data.” Hopster also includes playlists, which are built around time of viewing as well as a content theme. Netgem TV is one of Hopster ’s distribution partners. It is a UK-based OTT TV service, offering a range of free-to-air and subscription channels. With loads of
content for kids available on its on-demand channels, from the BBC to YouTube Kids – and Hopster – getting Netgem viewers the right content requires some care. “Content recommendation is slightly different for kids than for adults,” says Shan Eisenberg, chief commercial officer at Netgem TV. “We use a combination of AI or automated recommendation algorithms and editorial for adults. When you download our app for the first time, you get a swipe-right, swipe-left interface that helps create a profile that works behind the scenes. But it’s clear that automatically triggered content recommendations for kids is a bit of a minefield. We thought, if even Google has backtracked on it, we should be humble and not think we can be smarter than them.” As a result, Netgem’s content recommendations for kids are purely human-curated, with themed carousels on the UI linking to the appropriate kids’ content available on its various channels, including Hopster. “It is about holding the hand of the consumer in the face of the enormous number of options they have today.”
IT’S CLEAR THAT AUTOMATICALLY
TRIGGERED CONTENT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR KIDS IS A BIT OF AMINEFIELD
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