As live TV streamers look for ways to differentiate from the competition, much of the strategy seems to come down to channel choice or price. But Fubo CEO David Gandler has his eyes set on the DVR as the path to the future. Speaking today at the JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Gandler teased a mind-blowing future for Fubo’s DVR.
“When all said and done is we’ll probably see some significant upgrades to the DVR that we probably haven’t seen since the advent of cloud recording,” Gandler said. “Think about indexing all of your all of the videos in your DVR. So you can follow a team. You could follow a player. And you can follow a company. You can follow a politician. And all of this would be personalized for you.”
While this advancement sounds futuristic, it’s not terribly different from old-school TiVo boxes in the early 2000s, which allowed you to follow an actor, director, or musician, and the DVR would record all appearances of those people automatically. But Fubo’s plans go even further with the help of AI.
Gandler gave the example of a sports fan who recorded 10 games over a weekend. A user could speak into his remote and ask for seven minutes of highlights. “Now we should know the types of highlights you like, whether it’s interceptions or sacks, or whatever it is that you like, the machine should be able to really create a very efficient user experience,” Gandler said.
“You can say, ‘Show me every 3-pointer that was shot in the last two minutes of a game with a score that was maybe a 6-point game spread.’ You can ask questions like that,” Gandler explained. “You can also wait until the end of the season before the Super Bowl and say, ‘Hey, show me every pass that this quarterback has thrown on Sundays in weather that was below 30 degrees.’ So it’s a really powerful way to allow you to experience content, especially in an environment where you have hundreds of channels.”
Fubo recently released an “Instant Highlights” feature with some of the same functionality, though it currently performs similarly to YouTube TV’s “Key Plays” feature.
Such powerful personalization would give Fubo a leg up in attracting die-hard fans. It would also require a significant ability to parse the metadata of video. Gandler said the company is already beta-testing some of these features.
Fubo
Fubo is a live TV streaming service with about 90 top channels that start at $79.99 per month. This plan includes local channels, 25 of the top 35 cable channels, and regional sports networks (RSNs). In total, you should expect to pay about $91.99 per month, after adding in their RSN Fee. Fubo was previously known as “fuboTV.”