TV Scout: Lowering the Entry Barrier to Personalized TV Program Recommendation

In this paper, we present TV Scout, a recommendation system providing users with personalized TV schedules. The TV Scout architecture addresses the “cold-start” problem of information filtering systems, i.e. that filtering systems have to gather information about the user’s interests before they can compute personalized recommendations. Traditionally, gathering this information involves upfront user effort, resulting in a substantial entry barrier. TV Scout is designed to avoid this problem by presenting itself to new users not as a filtering system, but as a retrieval system where all user effort leads to an immediate result. While users are dealing with this retrieval functionality, the system continuously and unobtrusively gathers information about the user’s interests from implicit feedback and gradually evolves into a filtering system. An analysis of log file data gathered with over 10,000 registered online users shows that over 85% of all first-time users logged in again, suggesting that the described architecture is successful in lowering the entry barrier.1