Where to Watch: Product Spotlight

Damon Smith, PA TV Metadata’s Digital Content Manager gives us the insight on content discovery solution Where to Watch.

Playing a key role in the Where to Watch product, Damon shares what an average working day looks like working on the solution, highlights and challenges that have occurred when working with Where to Watch, and what’s in store for its future.

For those not familiar, can you give us a brief overview of Where to Watch, what is it when the idea come from and what does it set out to achieve?

As we headed into the lockdowns in 2020, we were always as a business thinking about VOD services, where we are the market leader in the UK and Ireland in terms of linear listings and data aggregation and content management. But obviously linear won’t be the future when we have lots of streaming services and catch-up services.

During the lockdowns, in those 12 months we saw a 55% increase in the number of UK subscribers to streaming services. And that really accelerated the interest in putting together a product that could not only look at all the linear services that we do, which is over 650 channels, but also then look at all the streaming platforms and catch-up services and essentially empower consumers to find every single film and TV show currently available in the UK and Ireland.

As a consumer, that’s difficult to do because obviously each platform has no commercial interest in telling you that the next series of the show you’ve just watched happens to be on a rival platform or the next film in a franchise happens to be on a rival platform. They want to keep you on their platform by inspiring you with everything else that they’ve got. So, the real driving force behind Where to Watch was to essentially let consumers get rid of all their different remote controls and give them complete control over what they were watching by giving them a complete data set of every single film, every single TV episode that’s available and moderating and matching them beautifully. Because the other problem that you have with anything like that is that streaming platforms have their own catalogues. They have their own ways of displaying different things. So, season one episode one of a particular show on one platform, might be, Season 2 episode one on a different platform. So, there isn’t any consistency across those platforms. And so, the real driving force behind Where to Watch was for us to have a team of dedicated editors looking at every single platform, every single day of the year. That’s 365 days of the year including Christmas Day and Boxing Day, making sure that when platforms are adding those films and TV shows, we are double checking that they are the correct episodes, the correct films and when they’re not, we’re manually matching them back to our central database to make sure that everything is beautifully matched and beautifully moderated.

Tell us what an average working day looks like in your world when working on Where to Watch?

Well, the real joy and, I suppose from my team’s point of view, the challenge is that content is added to platforms throughout the day. So, with those major platforms like Netflix, they add their content at one minute past midnight, Los Angeles time, which generally speaking will be one minute past eight our time. So just after 8:00 AM every single morning, we’re seeing a huge amount of content being added to platforms, the UK platforms they may start adding it one minute past midnight our time.

And then we’re seeing lots of content dropping throughout the day, so platforms like Prime Video now are adding content at one o’clock, five o’clock our time. So, the real challenge is to constantly be on top of when content’s being added. A typical day for us would be as soon as we’re in the office each day, we have people starting at very early in the morning and we’re working up until eleven o’clock at night. That team will be constantly checking the content that’s coming into us, matching that content, moderating it, making sure it’s going live into Where to Watch as soon as possible.

Because one of the key selling points of Where to Watch is that we recognise consumers want to watch content as soon as it’s available, and there’s no point us adding content the day after it’s available. It needs to be on that platform as soon as possible. But obviously with that caveat that it needs to be accurate, it needs to be as comprehensive as possible and as a business, one of our key selling points here at PA is that we’re constantly looking to add that extra editorial, that extra metadata, whether that be links to trailers, whether that be links to Wikipedia pages, whatever it may be. We’re constantly looking for how can we enrich this service and provide the best possible content discovery for our customers and therefore for their consumers as well.

Can you give us an insight into the people working behind the scenes at Where to Watch and the scale of work they must deliver?

We have a a team of dedicated editors working across PA TV Metadata. We have sites in Howden and Letchworth and in London we have dedicated teams. They are working throughout the day. There are hundreds of films and TV shows added every single day and they keep an eye on our specially built dashboards throughout the day to see when those new shows and films are being added. And it’s their responsibility to make sure they’re added as soon as possible. But making sure that we’re moderating and checking it wherever we need to.

And what about the numbers behind Where to Watch as a solution?

Currently we have 14 platforms live on the service, including the major catch-up services like Channel 4, BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 5 and UKTV Play, which of course we’re expecting to be rebranded as You shortly later on this year. And then those major streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, Paramount Plus, they’re all contained within Where to Watch. And at any time at the moment, we’re seeing approximately 400,000 films and TV episodes live at any one point that our sitting there and we’re making sure are completely accurate within the Where to Watch service.

Can you give us a glimpse into the future of Where to Watch and if there are any developments or exciting news in place for it?

The features of Where to Watch is that it’s completely flexible and we’re able to respond to changes in the marketplace or any demands that our customers might have in terms of ingesting new platforms. So, one of our key focuses for 2024 will be looking at how live sport impacts Where to Watch and potentially a Where to Watch sport product because within the last couple of days we’ve seen Netflix announcing a deal with World Wrestling Entertainment. Outside of America, Netflix will become the exclusive home of all WWE programming and those key live events like WrestleMania. We already know that Prime Video is the home of live tennis. And DAZN becomes a home for boxing, and those live sports events seem to be a driving force in terms of streaming services. So one of our key focuses this year is to really understand how does that impact Where to Watch? Should we create a Where to Watch sports product? And we’re in a really unique position here at PA in that not only do we have PA TV Metadata, which is a market leader in its field, we have a sports division, we have betting services, we have racing services and we also have the StreamAMG business which is an exclusive home for streaming certain sports, so it would be an incredibly attractive proposition if we could bring all of those together into one product.

Working on the Where to Watch projects what have been your highlights so far and the big challenges you’ve encountered?

I mean, there have been some huge challenges when you work with metadata, you’re completely reliant on the quality of the metadata at source, and one of the key challenges that we’ve found working Where to Watch is that the quality, the accuracy, and the comprehensiveness of that metadata at source varies wildly across the different platforms. So, one of the real kind of joys that we found is that we’ve created in-house software, which helps us match and compare that sort, compare that metadata. We’ve had to build our own systems in house to deal with that and we’ve seen lots of different milestones. The first 100,000 assets, we managed to match was a huge milestone. We’ve seen that increase 100,000, then 200,000, 300,000 – it just keeps going up. We’ve added lots of new platforms as I say, we’re up to 14 platforms now. We’re also always looking for what should be the next platform that we match.

And then with the different platforms starting to do live events more. So, we’ve seen Netflix, for example live stream, the Stream Actors Guild Awards and I’m sure we’re going to see other platforms do similar things as live stream events become more important. So how do you factor in something that goes live at a specific time and then stays on that platform perhaps for an entire year? It’s an event that everybody’s going to tune in for at a specific time, almost like a linear schedule. So again, because Where to Watch already incorporates linear listings, it’s set up perfectly to accommodate that.

And then we also look forward to FAST channels as they become more important. Again, as a business, we’re already dealing with FAST channels. Those can feed into Where to Watch because Where to Watch is delivered through our TV API the same as all our linear services. This means that Where to Watch can expand, adapt and be flexible in a way that perhaps other products can’t.

What are your hopes and dreams for Where to Watch in 2024?

So, I’d already talked a little bit about sport, which I think could be a key focus. Those two vowels which are at the top of everybody’s thoughts now, AI – that’s going to be incredibly important. I think in AI learning, we are seeing London and the UK in general becoming an epicentre for AI businesses now.

PA Media and PA TV Metadata are in a unique position in that we are the primary source of truth about so much information.

PA TV Metadata has a database containing hundreds of millions of words that AI can learn from the Where to Watch product. That is incredibly exciting because if you were to have AI services, or indeed just some of these virtual assistants like Siri, they can learn from Where to Watch. So, if you were to say Siri, please tell me something or Google, please tell me something or Amazon, please tell me something – Where to Watch can provide you that information very quickly because the metadata is so comprehensive, so rich, and so accurate.

So, I think this year could be incredibly exciting in terms of that Where to Watch product becoming vocalised in terms of those different learnings in terms of AI services learning from it. I think this year could be incredibly exciting because the AI industry in particular is accelerating at such a phenomenal rate.

What are the films and TV shows that are on your Where to Watch list?

Well, I’m very lucky in that my day job is PA’s in-house film and home entertainment critic. So, I am constantly watching lots of films and lots of TV shows in terms of what I would be personally searching for. I mean, there’s lots of amazing stuff recently. Ripley with Andrew Scott on Netflix is something that I was excited about.

I’m looking forward to seeing season three of Heartstoppers later in the year.

There are lots of great films and TV shows. We are really spoilt for choice in terms of those.

What else personally, will I be looking forward to? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head simply because I’m consuming so much content as it is day in, day out.

And I’m in a very fortunate position that I get to consume that content in advance. So, for me I’m often seeing films and TV shows weeks and sometimes months before they’re surfacing on these streaming channels, so I guess my Where to Watch is my job in terms of I’m in that fortunate position that I’m helping people learn Where to Watch rather than necessarily thinking about it too much myself.

Learn more about Where to Watch here.

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