In the latest video from our Thought Leaders Circle series, SpringServe’s Joseph Hirsch explain how their Tiles product benefits programmers, OEMs and, above all, consumers.

JOSEPH HIRSCH:

When you turn on a smart TV today, the default landing page or home screen is a composition of a "hero"or a large image in a grid of what we call “tiles.”

And these grids are a combination of things.

The grids represent the apps that you have installed.

They represent SVOD, or Subscription Video On Demand products.

They represent the hardware manufacturers native TV service, and you see suggested content.

So if you think about this home page, like you thought long ago about the home pages of AOL and Yahoo!, it's the place where you jump off to the content that you're going to consume.

It's the user's first impression of “what should I watch today?”

So being able to intelligently manage this grid of tiles to maximize user engagement, increase average revenue per user per year, and generally move people into a positive user experience—that increases the frequency by which they engage with the TV and the amount of content that they watch.

So when I look at this home screen where we have these tiles, I look at the opportunity to better customize and tailor the user's experience in terms of interacting with the television and the content on it.

The general way to think about it is, “for every hour, how many minutes of ads do I have?” Generally in the old cable days, you might have as many as 24 ad minutes per hour.

Today these things are flexible and you can tailor the ad load to the individual user since maximizing engagement is synonymous with maximizing revenue and so you can create a personalized ad experience where, the first time the user engages with the service, they have a lower ad load.

And then over time, as the user consumes more content, you increase the ad load—that eases the user into the experience - it allows for better management of the minutes within the hour for the viewer and allows the user to consume more content.

And then once they're fully engaged with something you can layer on more ad minutes and increase the value.