First Workshop on Recommender Systems for Television and online Video (RecSysTV)

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the First Workshop on Recommender Systems for Television and online Video (RecSysTV) that is happening in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2014 conference in Foster City, Silicon Valley, USA from 6th-10th October 2014. For many households the television is still the central entertainment hub in their home, and the average TV viewer spends about half of their leisure time in front of a TV (3-5 hours/day). We often have heard the term "so many choices, so little to watch" which expresses the desire for recommender systems to help consumers deal with the often overwhelming choices they face. TV and online video recommender systems face a number of unique challenges, for example, the content available on TV is constantly changing and often only available once which leads to severe cold start problems and we consume our entertainment in groups of varying compositions (household vs individual) which makes building taste profiles and modeling consumer behavior very challenging, Recommender systems also have to address a number of very different consumption patterns, such as actively browsing through a list of personalized Video on Demand choices that match our current mood, compared to enjoying a "lean back experience" where a recommender system playlists a stream of TV shows from our favorite channels for us. We believe that this workshop is of great interest to both academic researchers and industrial practitioners due to the importance of TV and online video in our daily lives and the challenging technical problems that need to be addressed.