Viewer Profiles
Through the Miniweb Platform, TV viewers can enhance their interactive and entertainment experience by saving personal information including demographic information, payment mechanisms, search preferences, bookmarks and playlists to create their individual viewer profile. They can also link their profile to social networking sites, allowing them to interact with friends via the Miniweb Platform.
Search & Recommendations
The platform enables smart search, recommendations and community functions allowing viewers to discover and manage internet video content from multiple sources. It is able to filter and manage video metadata making the content available to the Search & Recommendation features. Contextual recommendations for video are based on the broadband or broadcast content viewed, enabling constant 'new discovery'
The platform is able to dynamically filter the available content and control what is displayed to the viewer based on the capabilities of the device, the speed of the viewer's broadband connection or location.
Payments & Transactions
Miniweb's payments solution enables content owners to set up secure payment services quickly and easily. Viewers can store their payment details securely before paying for one-off or recurring subscriptions to video or music content, taking part in competitions, voting and paying for goods and services quickly and easily.
Social Networking & Community
The Miniweb Platform offers a number of community functions enabling viewers to personalise their viewing and interact with each other directly through the TV.
Send: Communicate a playlist, recommendation, message, interactive destination or programme between profiles
Share: Make your playlists, favourites, saved searches etc visible to your TV Buddies
Publish: Make your playlists, favourites, saved searches etc visible to the whole Miniweb community
Miniweb profiles can be linked to 'real world' identies (Facebook accounts, mobile phone numbers, email addresses) making community functions easy to set up and maintain.
Platform Management Console
The Platform Control web site is the business to business face of Miniweb. It allows content owners to register TV Apps (TV Sites, Widgets, Flash games for example) and also their metadata feeds to publish internet video to TV devices via the Miniweb Platform. The Console also allows content owners and broadcasters to set up 'Content Owner Menus' creating a branded play environment for internet video and enhancements to linear TV channels. It also provides reporting, the ability to buy 'pay for' additional products such as TV Keys and set up payment structures for premium rate content, as well as allowing opt-in to syndicated advertising revenues.
Content Menus and Branding
Miniweb's Content Owner Menus help broadcasters and video content owners to make their content branded and more interactive and easily discoverable by a wider TV audience, extending the viewer's engagement with the brand beyond the current video (but without losing sight of it). While the video content or TV channel is playing the viewer can display the menu on-screen at any time with a press of a button to explore the brand's content further.
Menu features include branded recommendations, branded content search, catch-up TV, directlinks to video and interactive pages and targeted adverts/sponsored links.
The menus are easy to navigate using a remote control and work dynamically to deliver contextually relevant menu options to help viewers get what they want quickly and easily, and the Miniweb Platform ensures that they work seamlessly on any type of broadband connected TV device.
Advertising
The platform supports in-video advertising formats including pre/mid/post roll as well as on-screen advertising 'overlays' and banners. In this way each piece of content can be linked to advertising relevant to the viewer and the content they are watching.
Contextual, demographic and behavioural targeting enables advertisers to deliver ads to TV viewers with a level of relevance and sophistication that was only previously possible on the internet. Web-style tracking and reporting enables advertisers to see clear return on their marketing spend. Miniweb's advertising feature is fully compliant with the current UK Data Protection Act and provides end user control over this data. Miniweb can offer a full service for publishers if required including ad sales/management and ad serving.
Subscription Management and Entitlements
This platform component keeps track of purchases and micro-subscriptions between individuals using the Miniweb system and content owners. It enforces the content owners' payment structures, providing unchecked access to content viewers are entitled to see and also provides a simple guided payment process for the viewer when a payment is due. The module also ensures that Adult content is appropriately filtered and generates revenue share calculations and reporting.
Interactive & Image Transcoding
The Platform can automatically transform images retrieved from internet services to appropriate sizes and formats for TV, allowing many more internet image formats to be used in content while still working across all TV devices even when they have limited image format support. For TV Sites authored in TVML (pure XML based ETSI standard for TV Sites) the TV Site can also be translated into various dialects of HTML/JS to allow 'author once for all' on the various types of TV browsers common in TV devices.
