The Guardian is leading the development of a YouView and Android prototype service designed to help consumers discover TV and video content.
The media brand has partnered with business innovation agency Golant Media Ventures, customer intelligence business Idio and music metadata experts Decibel, after securing funding from the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.
The partners will now develop a multiplatform system that will “pour Guardian content” into an app that will direct visitors to a variety of rich content aggregated from TV, film and music rights holders.
For example, a feature on food could link through to a variety of cookery-related TV shows. The platform, dubbed the Film Ancillary Revenues Optimisation Engine (Faroe), is also likely to be licensed to content owners internationally to allow them to build their own versions.
No firm commercial business models have yet been established for the service, which is still at a research stage. Development is likely to start in May. The aim is to help producers and distributors increase the amount of money they can generate from their content via multiplatform channels.
Tom Jackson, director of digital agency for The Guardian, said there was an opportunity to leverage its brand and content archive across connected devices. “We’re trying to show how we can use metadata in a more intelligent way to cross-link different types of content,” he said.
Golant Media chief executive Patrick Towell said: “The TV industry is obsessed with navigation via an EPG but online, people browse and discover content in a different way. We want to bring the way the semantic web works to television, with rights holders given a share of the revenues generated.”
In March, Guardian News & Media was appointed as one of 16 content providers to the YouView advisory board. The publisher is also understood to be working on a separate YouView project.
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