Datatonic Partners with Cineverse to Deliver Generative AI Movie Recommendations

Every day, over 1 billion people globally use streaming services to find their next favorite movies, TV shows, and music albums. Cineverse wanted to take the searching experience to the next level. 

The growing abundance of content and content sources is becoming overwhelming for audiences; users now spend an average of 10-and-a-half minutes searching for something to watch, with 20% abandoning their search and doing something else instead.

With this in mind, Cineverse, Datatonic, and Google Cloud set out to develop an AI-powered search and discovery tool designed to make deciding what to watch as entertaining as the movie itself. 

Its new “artificial intelligence-based video advisor” will be launched initially with the persona known simply as “Ava.” The primary persona, Ava, was developed to be the ultimate movie nerd: Part critic. Part drinking buddy. All cinephile. Future updates will involve building out a collection of personas to suit different users’ tastes and moods. 

The Ava persona, including its personality and language, was meticulously created by Cineverse, and brought to life through a combination of prompt engineering and LLM fine tuning. 

“Built entirely on Google Cloud, cineSearch leverages a sophisticated system of multiple Large Language Models that guides users through a highly personalized user journey to deliver content recommendations tailored to individual preferences. Under the hood, Ava’s Large Language Models and semantic retrieval methods recognize both highly specific, such as genre, decade and actors, and nuanced user intents, such as cinematic mood and atmosphere, as well as combinations of these. 

A collection of guardrails and Google Cloud security best practices ensure the solution is safe, robust and ethical. A monitoring and alerting system scans both user inputs for malicious attacks, inappropriate and off-topic messages, and LLM outputs for unintended behaviors.

The heart of the technology lies in creating a natural and engaging interaction that is designed to ensure the users feel comfortable and empowered throughout their discovery process. We are confident that cineSearch can satisfy even the most eclectic cinematic tastes.” – Valentin Cojocaru, Head of Data Science, Datatonic

To ensure cineSearch fulfills its purpose, it was developed with crucial features, such as guardrails and LLM best practices to reduce risk for Cineverse by avoiding unintended replies from the chatbot and keeping the conversation on the topic of movies. cineSearch will also provide direct links to where its recommendations can be purchased or streamed.

“Effective search and discovery is currently the most pressing problem for users of streaming services today,” says Tony Huidor, Chief Technology Officer & Chief Operating Officer of Cineverse. “We first developed cineSearch as an answer to our own problem. Using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, we now have the ability to expand this feature well beyond our initial expectations. We feel this is a great example of leveraging the power of AI to not only create better user experiences, but to also help aid in the discovery of great films that fans may not have otherwise found.”

“Generative AI has the potential to fundamentally transform the media industry, fueling a new era of cloud-enabled capabilities that can significantly improve the consumer experience,” said Anil Jain, Global Managing Director of Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud. “By leveraging Google Cloud’s leading gen AI capabilities, cineSearch can further personalize and streamline the user experience, providing viewers a vastly improved way to discover new content, with relevant recommendations for movies and television shows at their fingertips.”

The partnership will enable Cineverse to rapidly embark on new data + AI initiatives, leading to improved customer experience, and operational efficiencies.

“Cineverse is thrilled to partner with Google and Datatonic for the cineSearch project,” Huidor says. “We needed all hands on-deck to do something that’s never been done before. Internally, we’ve joked that it was our ‘Avengers, assemble’ moment – bringing together the best in both streaming and GenerativeAI, and I’m excited for everyone to see what we’ve been working on.” 

To keep up to date with cineSearch and try it out for yourself, join the public beta waitlist. And if you’re in New York, come along to our Generative AI panel with Cineverse’s Senior Vice President, Marketing, Lauren McCarthy, to learn more. Register here.