Design of a TV Show Recommender Engine and Interface

The arrival of PVRs (Personal Video Recorders)—tape less devices that allow for easy navigation and storage of TV content—and the availability of hundreds of TV channels in US homes have made the task of finding something good to watch increasingly difficult. In order to ease this content selection overload problem, we pursued three related research themes. First, we developed a recommender engine that tracks users’ TV-preferences and delivers accurate content recommendations. Second, we designed a user interface that allows easy navigation of selections and easily affords inputs required by the recommender engine. Third, we explored the importance of gaining users’ trust in the recommender by automatically generating explanations for content recommendations. In evaluation with users, our smart interface came out on top beating TiVo’s interface and TV Guide Magazine, in terms of usability, fun, and quick access to TV shows of interest. Further, our approach of combining multiple recommender ratings—resulting from various machine-learning methods—using neural networks has produced very accurate content recommendations.