Cineverse believes that it has come up with the streaming video business’ Holy Grail — an effective search and discovery tool.
And the self-proclaimed next-generation entertainment studio is taking its long-gestating cineSearch out of beta this week and launching for business clients.
First announced in February 2024 along with a partnership with Google Cloud, and unveiled in public beta in May of last year, Cineverse said its AI-powered conversational search and discovery tool is now complete and ready to sell through the Google Cloud Marketplace to entities including smart TV OEMs and streaming companies. Broad consumer availability of the tool is targeted down the road.
“We have solved the search and discovery problem,” boldly declared Cineverse President of Technology and Chief Product Officer Tony Huidor, in an interview with StreamTV Insider.
Huidor told us his engineering team, 90 members strong, has been working on the project for four years, reimagining the very limited traditional paradigm of searching based on keywords. For more than 65,000 movies dating back to 1975, as well as countless TV show episodes spanning to the same era, the whole concept of metadata had to be rethought, he explained, on artificial-intelligence terms that go far beyond the limits of a programming synopsis.
“This allows us to give recommendations based on the intrinsic nature of the film rather than keyword matching from the synopsis, which you see in traditional metadata,” Huidor explained.
Where searching for a “holiday film” with traditional software tools might surface a limited selection of titles based on that term being featured in the logline, the voice-enabled cineSearch blends a far more personalized array of data — the user’s mood, for example, along with the content's theme, popularity, quality, tone, setting, style, music score, plot, micro-genre, among many other traits.
The tool was developed using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and Gemini 2.0 Pro model.
Cineverse, which is developing cineSearch through its very recently formed Cineverse Technology Group, is pitching the tool as a churn buster, citing studies that directly tie subscriber defections to “binge scrolling.”
Huidor believes his company is now in the “pole position” for being able to offer the video entertainment industry’s first truly effective search and discovery platform.
In debuting cineSearch for the B2B market, Cineverse is touting a range of new and existing features and capabilities:
- Cineverse said the product’s proprietary dataset, called cineCore, has been expanded to include more than 2 million titles and can be licensed separately be third parties.
- The company said the latest version features “deeper contextual information,” including the integration of dynamic movie ratings from leading online film community denizens, as well as data from major awards and festivals.
- The newest iteration also includes a new proprietary AI feature called “Q-Point,” (short for Quiddity, which means the inherent essence of something). This feature was designed to give the searcher context and insight as to why a particular title was recommended.
- Behavioral data has also been integrated into cineSearch, allowing the tool to base recommendations on viewing history, favorites and personal recommendations.
- The tool enables unified search across more than 60 linked streaming services.
- The product’s chatbot, named Ava, responds to voice or text and can be customized by third-party customers.
While many companies have tried to solve streaming search and discovery — some, based in Silicon Valley and armed with far greater resources than Cineverse — Huidor said the solution comes down to who is willing to grind the hardest.
“There’s no playbook on how to solve this,” he said. “It comes down to a lot of trial and error.”