On Thursday, Aug. 13, Ophélie Boucaud, Principal Analyst, Dataxis, will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel “Find It FAST: Leveraging AI in CTV Discovery.” AI is transforming how viewers find content and the never-ending struggle for visibility in a saturated content ecosystem. This panel unpacks the recommendation engine architectures and real-time personalization pipelines that top streaming platforms and EPGs are using to surface the right content for the right user at the right moment and the increasing shift toward agent-assisted, conversational search. Streaming discovery experts provide engineers and product teams with a practical look at leveraging emerging tech to build and enhance discovery experiences.
Confirmed panelists include:
Register now for Streaming Media Connect!
Ophélie Boucaud joined Dataxis at the Berlin office in 2020 and has been contributing to Dataxis’ media, video, and telecom research with a strong focus on innovations in advertising markets. She is now in charge of Dataxis research and data analysis related to TV, telecommunications, and OTT industries in EMEA and Asia-Pacific. She regularly publishes strategic insights on streaming markets, advanced advertising, and telecom technologies and has participated in many panels addressing these issues.
“Discovery has been among streaming’s biggest challenges for over a decade: too much content, too little shelf space, and recommendation rows that push what platforms want to promote rather than what viewers actually want to watch,” Boucaud says. “Our panelists will discuss what AI can contribute in this new era: making more libraries findable, moving UX toward conversational and natural-language search, and freeing recommendations from rigid EPG taxonomies. They’ll also delve into the new challenges posed by generative AI: how to ground models and prevent them from hallucinating titles or mangling metadata, why trusted data should always be the foundation of any credible discovery product, and why AI is no miracle cure but a tool for improving specific engagement moments.”
Ashok Bania is VP of AI products at Gracenote, where he oversees product strategy designed to help entertainment industry customers leverage advanced technologies to make video and sports content discovery more intuitive, trustworthy, and intelligent. Bania is co-author of The Product Manifesto, a platform created to help product professionals navigate business challenges and opportunities. He speaks frequently on product leadership, creator economies, product-led growth and how product organizations must evolve as AI changes both how products are built and what users expect.
“AI is empowering video services to reinvent search, discovery and recommendation capabilities that connect viewers to content in amazing ways,” Bania says. “But there’s a problem. Because AI-powered user experiences are probabilistic, they’re highly prone to errors and confabulation. In fact, recent Gracenote research pegs the hallucination rate for TV show and movie metadata attributes delivered by an ungrounded LLM at around 80% to 90%. At Streaming Media Connect, I look forward to discussing opportunities for services to benefit from AI-driven content discovery and sharing data that underscores the critical importance of user trust to these efforts.”
Jon Giegengack is the principal at Hub Entertainment Research, which he founded in 2013. Thanks to his more than 20 years of experience in research for the entertainment industry, he recognized the need for real-time insight about the changing world of digital entertainment. Giegengack works with leading entertainment brands including ABC, Comcast, Netflix, Sony, AMC, and AT&T. He is a regular speaker at industry events and has been quoted in publications like Variety, TheWrap, Forbes, and Bloomberg.
“Public discourse has mostly centered on the AI use cases that pose ‘existential threats’ to Hollywood, such as AI-generated video, music, or actors,” Giegengack shares. “But our research shows the most appealing AI use cases to consumers are the ones that simplify the viewing experience, in particular improved discovery. Consumers want natural language discovery that allows them to describe the content they want in their own words, and they want to see results across their services (not just in one app)—in other words, the kind of tasks that AI does exceptionally well.”
Alok Ranjan is CEO and co-founder at Future Today, which owns and operates popular channels including HappyKids, Fawesome, and iFood.tv on OTT devices and connected TVs. Ranjan has app-building and video-management expertise, as well as experience in content creation and products for AI-driven editorial processes, content acquisition, editorial optimization, and video search. He was previously senior business strategy manager at Microsoft.
“Here’s the real shift: AI recommendations used to be built almost entirely on past behavior—what you clicked, what you watched. Now, natural-language search lets viewers simply express what they want in the moment, and the system responds to intent rather than just history. That’s a meaningful improvement,” Ranjan shares. “But it isn’t sufficient on its own—particularly for family content, where the right recommendation isn’t just relevant, it’s appropriate. The platforms getting this right treat AI as the engine for discovery, while people remain responsible for the judgment behind it.”
Chris Ambrozic is VP and general manager of TiVo’s content discovery group, a portfolio of data-rich, AI-enabled tools for entertainment companies to build outstanding personalized user experiences. Throughout his career, Ambrozic has been passionate about the application of machine learning solutions to drive real-time decision-making and optimization.
“We’re entering a new era where viewers search with conversations instead of keywords, giving platforms far richer context about what they actually want,” Ambrozic says. “What excites me most is what AI does with that context. It can finally explain the ‘why’ behind a recommendation, in language people trust, instead of an opaque match score. Done right, that turns discovery from a search into something closer to a recommendation from a friend who knows your taste, and takes the friction out of finding something worth watching.”
Register now for Streaming Media Connect!
Related Articles
Sneak Preview: Optimizing Live Streaming QoS and QoE
On August 12, panelists from AWS, Paramount, Al Jazeera, and TAG Video Systems will join the Streaming Media Connect panel “Optimizing Live Streaming QoS and QoE.” From measuring and improving rebuffering, startup time, and bitrate quality to tying QoE metrics directly to retention, this panel focuses on quantifiable streaming metrics that matter, as well as harder-to-measure viewer satisfaction signals that define true QoS (quality of service) and QoE (quality of experience). Come for the real-world war stories from high-stakes live events, where every hiccup costs viewers and revenue, and stay for the real-time QoS/QoE Q&A with live streaming’s best and brightest.
24 Jul 2026
Sneak Preview: The Retention Game: Managing Subscriber Acquisition and Churn
On Thursday, Aug. 13, Roku’s Nicole Fencel, Philo’s Steven Chang, Women in Streaming Media’s Deepali Narsiker, and Horse & Country’s David Guinan will join Chris Pfaff for the Streaming Media Connect panel “The Retention Game: Managing Subscriber Acquisition and Churn.” Join this closing panel for a candid discussion on which subscriber acquisition and retention strategies work in 2026 and which ones fail to move the needle. Learn how leading streaming platforms are drawing on data science insights and leveraging personalization to turn one-show drop-ins into long-term, loyal subscribers.
14 Jul 2026
Building the Perfect Live-Event Operations Playbook
On Thursday, Aug. 13, LinkedIn’s Chris Packard, LiveX’s Corey Behnke, and MemeHouse’s Zylo Hefferan will join the SVTA’s Bhavesh Upadhyaya for a Streaming Media Connect panel that examines how top streaming teams prepare for, monitor, and recover from tentpole live events like sports and concerts. The discussion will range from pre-event capacity planning, load testing, and failover strategies to establishing best practices for managing traffic spikes when the stakes are highest.
14 Jul 2026
The Streaming Industry Is Building for Personalization Before It Solves Discovery
While the industry races towards increasingly sophisticated personalized sports streaming experiences, the fundamental viewing journey for many fans remains fragmented, confusing, and unnecessarily complicated.
29 May 2026
Better Video Recommendations Require AI and the Smart Use of Data
The CTO of Penthera explains how to push the envelope with deep personalization, using content discovery to empower the streaming video user experience.
12 Feb 2019
