The user base of the EBU PEACH recommender system keeps growing, with Swedish Broadcaster UR now also putting the engine at the heart of its online offering.
“We landed on PEACH after testing a number of systems”, says David Lowe Larsson, Tech lead and Developer Manager at UR. “One of the reasons was the very impressive collaboration between several different public service companies all around Europe. The transparency, the collaboration, and the public service perspective on the recommendation topic is truly unique when it comes to this type of solution.”
Peach is a recommendation and personalization ecosystem collaboratively developed under the umbrella of the EBU. Other than commercial black box solutions it is based on open source technology and designed to help avoid handing over user data to third parties. Its suite of personalization and data science tools drives editorial support tools for newsrooms as well as public facing offerings and multi-lateral content exchanges such as Eurovision News’ 'A European Perspective' platform.
“UR has tried different types of publication strategies to pique our users’ interest about any subject they might be interested in”, Lowe says. “We saw that recommendation systems can fulfil a number our goals and we saw the positive impact on helping users finds and consume content.”
UR is dubbed the ‘Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company’ and, together with Swedish Television and Swedish Radio, it forms part of the country’s public media group. UR’s focus lies on creating educational content that will continue to be relevant long after its initial broadcast through one of the organization’s distribution channels.
“We have already seen how Peach is helping us to better serve our audience. And even though we just started, we can see that there is a lot of potential to surface relevant content to our users and better help our audience to lasting knowledge”, Lowe added.