Long before The Filter existed it was an idea...
Almost
a decade ago Peter Gabriel, the musician and digital pioneer,
imagined a future of infinite choice. He predicted a world in which
people would access any entertainment, anywhere at any time. Rather
than being enriched in a world of infinite choice we would become
overwhelmed. "When many of us are drowning in choice," he said, "we
are going to need smart filters..."
Indeed, as the web grew bigger and faster, volumes of content
increased exponentially. And, sure enough, the challenges of
navigation and discovery soon became an obstacle to enjoyment.
In 2004, Peter was introduced to the physicist and software
entrepreneur, Martin Hopkins. This was a man, who shared Peter's
vision, but had also developed a solution. As a passionate music
fan, Martin had designed a piece of software to manage his music
collection. The programme learned about his tastes and, using
artificial intelligence, offered playlists and recommendations.
The two men joined forces with the venture
capital specialist, Eden Ventures and The Filter was born...
Successful trials of a playlist desktop application and a
recommendations website quickly showed how effective and reliable
the technology was, even with large volumes and different formats.
New user interface tools and applications were launched and vast
amounts of consumption and catalogue data were gathered and
crunched. The Filter began to attract attention from industry
commentators and, crucially, interest from commercial partners
grew.
And today...
The Filter uses its world-leading recommendations and relevance
systems to help content owners, publishers and aggregators around
the world maximise their content and services. The Filter is proven
to increase usage and engagement which in turn improves margins...
making entertainment services more efficient and competitive. With
video, music, applications and games, The Filter consistently
out-performs editorial and automated recommendations and crucially,
outputs can be skewed or biased to meet specific business
goals.
One day, all entertainment will be optimised this way. Until
then, The Filter is unique.