Ivi Launches First-of-its-Kind Personalized TV Deeply Integrated in VOD Service

MOSCOW(28 May 2015)

Ivi, the biggest legal VOD service in Russia, has announced the launch of Ivi TV - a first-of-its-kind personalized TV service based on and deeply integrated into its VOD platform. The simplicity of traditional TV finally comes together with the innovative opportunities offered by VOD, such as recommendation algorithms, a massive content catalogue, and the option to choose what to watch and when.  

The service is built around the idea of combining traditional TV with a recommendation system, developed by Ivi after years of studying users' preferences. Oleg Tumanov, the founder and CEO of Ivi, says: "TV hasn't undergone any fundamental changes in the last 50 years. And it has been doing exactly the same thing: broadcasting content to clients, not asking for any feedback from its users or providing any option to manage your own video stream. We decided to bring together the vast functionality of VOD and the easiness of traditional TV to provide a very effective solution for our users who at some point don't want to make a choice: they just want to turn on and watch."

There are several channels on Ivi TV that are aggregated through a recommendations system for each individual user; they are updated on a daily basis, depending on the history of previously watched movies and programs. In addition to these personalized channels, Ivi TV offers more than 40 genre channels that include more than 25,000 units of content, as well as special channels made by Ivi TV's team of editors and include the best video content from the whole Ivi library.  

As well as the standard TV routines such as switching channels via remote control, Ivi TV offers various options to manage your video stream: rewinding, going to the start, pausing, etc. The service was launched earlier this month on the LG SMART TV platform and is now also available on Samsung. It will expand to other platforms within the next few months.

Ivi always offers technological innovations to its users and has developed several other projects, such as Ivi online cinema, music.ivi, and video service for children. Ivi managed to build an effective model of mixed monetization of online content and hit the break even last year - making it the first VOD service in Russia to achieve that.