The Fifth Elephant 2017

The mobile has made tremendous progress - but it is still referred as “second screen” to the Television. Television (specifically Linear TV) will continue to be the most efficient way to get high quality content to millions of homes. Even though all the devices around us have gotten smarter - people still watch TV by memorizing channel numbers and move between painful guides. At the root of this problem is the lack of enough “smart” data about what’s happening on TV. Do you know?

• What channels are playing English Action Movies that are not in an Ad Break?
• Do you know which Ad is playing on (say) Star Plus?
• Do you know which celebrities are on screen - right now - across 400 channels?
• Do you know which shows are talking about Trump, right now?

Deeper data about Linear TV not only enables much better experiences for the viewer, but the entire industry.

Bharath Mohan walks you through some amazing patterns in the way Ads, House Promos, and other artifacts are played out on Television, and how some of these were exploited to build algorithms that predict what Ads are playing on TV.

Outline

Full slides are at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_ctBNRYUwf9bWRDMlVtbFc3QlU/view?usp=sharing

Speaker bio

Bharath Mohan loves to study how information flows through society - and create products that make the right information get to the right people. He got his PhD on this topic at IISc, Bangalore - mining for nurturers among computer science researchers. He then went on to work at Google News - studying how news starts off from an original source, and is quickly copied or re-hashed by several publishers across the world. He’s been doing startups over the last few years, and the latest one Sensara.TV is about unraveling Television.

Slides

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_ctBNRYUwf9bWRDMlVtbFc3QlU/view?usp=sharing