BBC Experiments with Personalized Videos that Adapt to Your Bias
By Carlton Wilcoxson • December 8, 2015
The BBC is developing personalized videos that can respond to a viewer’s personality and preferences. BBC will enable production teams to create content that is more personal and unique, in order to reflect the diversity of the audience. BBC R&D is exploring how to make innovative new media, with videos tailored to lots of individual users that still feel natural to the audience and exciting for the storyteller. In the future, a drama’s narrative, background music, color grading and general feel could all be shaped in real-time to suit the viewer’s personality.
BBC collects data using a mobile app to build a profile of each user and their preferences. It uses the responses from a personality quiz and learns about listening habits from their music collection. This profile can then be accessed by the Visual Perceptive Media web client to alter different aspects of the resulting film.Answers given to the questions are used to shape the narrative flow of the film, as well as details such as age and gender. The action could be different in certain scenes or a shot may favor one character over another, with some scenes possibly being cut out entirely.