Media Distillery announces the new Search and Discovery Suite, focused on accelerating the time it takes a viewer to discover appealing content, as the company has claimed in a statement.

Using the power of AI, the ojective of the system’s insight is to enable it to surface results that are better, both in terms of quantity and relevance. The user is presented with a diverse range of content to consider, all related to their specific interest.

“2025 is the year of search and discovery”, says Roland Sars, Co-founder and CEO of Media Distillery. “Viewers have so much content to choose from, sometimes they can’t see the forest for the trees. An abundance of choice can make deciding what to watch difficult, even overwhelming, and might well result in the viewer simply giving up and switching off”.

A 2024 research from Media Distillery’s partner Gracenote entitled “State of Play” found that consumers facing overwhelming content choice at any given moment spend over 10 minutes on average deciding what to watch, with as many as 20% deciding to watch nothing. “These are sobering numbers, and spotlights the serious churn risk if the viewer gets unsatisfying search results”, observes Sars.

Traditional search and discovery technologies have not kept pace with this diversity of viewing paradigms. “Simply presenting the viewer with many swim lanes full of linear TV content or VOD assets under the headings ‘because you watched XYZ’ or ‘other people are watching this’ is no longer sufficient to meet the elevated expectations of today’s viewers”, adds Sars.

An initial user test of the Search and Discovery Suite with a major cable operator delivered these results: in the study, which centred on sports content, over 75% of participants declared this technology lets them watch sports content they would otherwise not have found. Over 65% declared that with the Search and Discovery Suite, they were presented with more sports content within the TV platform, material that they’d otherwise be searching for on other platforms. “These results illustrate the Suite’s direct contribution to increased viewing time”, says Sars.

The Suite is designed to automatically generate metadata to focus on offering more search results to the viewer.

With advancements in generative AI such as Large Language Models, (LLMs), Visual Language Models (VLMs), semantic search and content embeddings, the Suite looks forward to support dynamic generation of content descriptions for snippets of broadcast content and library content to give viewers all the information they need to help them decide what to watch.

The capabilities of the Search and Discovery Suite complement the company’s recently announced Preview Distillery solution.

At Connected TV Summit 2025 (11-12 March, 155 Bishopsgate, London), Roland Sars will feature on a panel entitled “Using apps, devices and UX to deepen engagement” on Wednesday, March 12,12.25 PM.