Rovi, the media guide and recommendation company, has entered an agreement to acquire Veveo, a technology developer focused on conversation-powered media search, discovery, and personalization. The deal is worth at least $62-million, with another $7-million going to Veveo if performance thresholds are met.
Both companies are solution providers to content and delivery platforms. Rovi’s broad customer portfolio includes Apple and Shazam, both of which use Rovi’s music data. Rovi’s titanic database includes metadata, album art, and editorial commentary covering 3.2-million albums and 30-million tracks.
Veveo’s specialty is conversational searching, particularly in the movie category. The buzz phrase of Veveo’s development is “semantic technology,” which means that Veveo’s platform understands spoken commands, keeps track of a search’s context through multiple queries, and learns about the user over time. The result for the end user is content discovery and recommendations.
TechCrunch concisely put it this way: “Veveo is basically like Siri, if Siri actually worked.”
While the deal expands Rovi’s range and adds new media types, it is easy (and hopeful) to imagine that Veveo’s brain could be applied to music search and discovery. The challenges of music discovery are not exactly the same as with movies (movie availability in online services is spotty, whereas music is pretty much all there), but searching by conversation, and with better understanding of the user’s intent, could definitely add value to the often-dismal search engines in music services.
Rovi is a public company. The stock is trading without much movement as of this post.