Telenet betters Belgian Viewing experience with Media Distillery
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Editor
| 25 May 2021
Looking to enhance TV browsing and content discovery for its 1.8 million TV subscribers, Belgium’s largest cable operator Telenet has extended its deployments of Media Distillery technology in its nationwide cable TV and IPTV video services.
Telenet Media Distillerym25 May 2021
The installation is designed to improve the UX across 20 24-hour channels, is part of a new multi-year agreement which says Media Distillery demonstrates Telenet’s ongoing trust in ability to help improve user experience (UX) and encourage subscriber engagement.

The technology is now live and is seeing Image Distillery use AI to generate dynamically and automatically 3,000 “appealing and informative” still images every day for Telenet, representing any broadcast TV programme, for display within the service’s UI. The system captures images from any live broadcast feed, processes and optimises them, and creates well-composed screenshots that depict each programme in the most visually attractive way possible. Media Distillery notes that such high-quality, attractive representational UI imagery leads to better subscriber engagement and satisfaction. There is no limit to the quantity of images that can be generated, and they are created in real-time, while the programme is still running.

For each show, the AI-enabled Image Distillery solution captures several candidate images, and automatically strips out blank spaces as well as subtitles and graphics which might interfere with onscreen channel logos. It then resizes and crops the stills to create images likely to appeal to the viewer, with representations which illustrate the programme, episode by episode. The system evaluates and ranks the candidate images for each show based on pre-set quality criteria. It then automatically selects the optimal one and the operator can immediately utilise it in the UI, even during the show’s transmission. The solution is claimed to ensure the image chosen to be displayed in the UI is crisp and blur-free, that eyes are open, and the characters’ positioning in-frame is aesthetically pleasing.

The Media Distillery system also uses deep content understanding to identify and label features in audiovisual media automatically, enabling TV service providers to enhance the presentation of programmes and deliver what the technology provider says is a better viewing experience that meets the expectations of viewers.

“We have such a depth of linear channels, there is great disparity among them as regards the variety of images we have at our disposal to use in our EPG. While some of the bigger broadcasters dedicate a lot of editorial effort into curating their visuals and programme information, not all do, and this can be especially hard for some of the smaller broadcasters,” explained Telenet director of entertainment products Ivor Micallef.

“We know both anecdotally and intuitively that subscribers can get annoyed when presented with an image of a programme which lacks any information or representation of a particular episode. Users today are accustomed to the world of apps and streaming, where content is attractively visualised, so we wanted to find a way to populate our browsing experience with more visual content, and to do so in an attractive, smart and efficient way. Media Distillery has proven a great partner for Telenet; we recognise the ongoing value of our collaboration as our roadmap has evolved. We operate in a competitive market, and by deploying Image Distillery, we are further enhancing our UX with yet another powerful way to fortify our relationships with subscribers."