Orca Adds Social Networking to Content Search

Orca is adding social networking to its COMPASS content search system. COMPASS combines five search techniques:

• Most popular content
• User ratings
• Viewer profiles, including declared preferences and viewer watching patterns.
• Collaborative filters, e.g., "people who watched this also watched XYZ".
• Promotions by the IPTV service provider

Orca sees COMPASS as an alternative to the electronic program guide as a way to find content on an IPTV service. It believes that it is a much better choice than a two dimensional guide organized by time and by channel where there are a large number of channels and a large number of video on demand assets available. Orca believes that it will be the only usable way to access Internet content as it is included into IPTV services.

Orca is including COMPASS as part of its RIGHTv IPTV middleware software system. It is also offering COMPASS to service providers using other middleware software and to cable providers as a plug in module.

Orca is taking an interesting approach. I agree with them that search has to be the way that people access large amounts of content. I also like the fact that ORCA is offering COMPASS as a module that can be integrated with other software systems. I think that this will create a large market for ORCA.