If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it one-thousand times, there is no resource more valuable in this world than data. Imagine you are the CEO of a tech company that sells tablets designed for streaming content, but each tablet comes with a pre-set genre of content catered to the preferences of the user. In order to do this, you could create a line of tablets that cover a sort of “one-size-fits-all” approach in hopes that your efforts will satisfy user demands. But what if you had access to the content preferences of millions of users across a myriad of age ranges and socioeconomic backgrounds. It shouldn’t surprise you that data presents boundless opportunities for marketing, manufacturing, and other key components of the global marketplace.
As major advancements in technology have led to more efficient means for storing personal data (banking information, birth date, photos, social security numbers), we, humans, placed our full trust in these systems with the hope that our information was secured in an iron-clad safe amidst the outreaches of the internet.
Now, in the last few years, we’ve seen companies use data to cater product offerings more specifically to consumers, but we’ve yet to see this fully implemented in the world of streamable content. When you use YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, most likely you see ads and content that seems weirdly relatable to your personal preferences. This is because your data and the data of millions of other users like you is used in conjunction with perfectly-designed algorithms to “hand select” what you’re seeing on your screens. As amazing as this may seem to the average screen-junkie, the content experience has been, for the most part, pretty similar for everyone. The tech companies responsible for gifting us with content to stream for hours on end have yet to take advantage of the data in their possession to create a truly unique experience for each user…until now..
According to TechCrunch, it wont be long before we start seeing “smart content” available across all streaming platforms and devices. When we say “smart content,” we’re referring to the nature of content to dynamically cater itself to the personal preferences of whomever is watching, reading, or listening to content. Several months ago, Netflix took a stab at this type of content when they released an interactive episode of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch during the entirety of which a user could make on-screen selections to change the overall outcome of the episode. Throughout the episode, viewers are given choices to guide Stefan, the protagonist, through the plot, with choices as simple as what he’ll eat for breakfast, and as chilling as whether to ingest hallucinogens or not.
Smart content has the potential to make the user experience something unlike anything that’s ever been seen before. Keeping that in mind, the implementation of these concepts must be done properly lest users feel like they’re being tracked and watched for their data. To be fair, everyone is being tracked and watched for their data but the majority of the uninformed public are unaware of this. If this became clearer, I firmly believe there would be wide-spread panic.
