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Movielink and Akimbo Deliver "Real Relevance" to Consumers using ChoiceStream’s Personalization Solutions


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Leading video content providers select ChoiceStream for its proven ability to deliver one-to-one entertainment recommendations.

Cambridge, Mass., March 20, 2006 — ChoiceStream®, Inc., the leading provider of personalization solutions for businesses offering interactive media services to consumers announced today that Movielink and Akimbo, two of the online entertainment industry’s premier movie and video content providers, have licensed its personalization technology to power entertainment recommendations. These companies join other entertainment leaders, like Starz Entertainment Group, AOL and Yahoo! who have partnered with ChoiceStream to provide their consumers with a more relevant entertainment experience.
“ChoiceStream is very excited to be working with Movielink and Akimbo, two great brands on the cutting edge of how consumers download and view video content. Today, consumers are faced with an unprecedented amount of information. The explosion of content made available online and on TV each day can be overwhelming,” said Steve Johnson, CEO of ChoiceStream. “ChoiceStream personalization provides powerful ways of connecting consumers with the video, movies and music that they’ll most enjoy. So that, no matter how many choices consumers have, more will always be better and finding the right content will always be a click away. ”
Finding the Movies You Love
More old and new movie titles become available everyday. The growing inventory of entertainment choices makes it imperative for movie download services to provide ways that enable consumers to browse titles easily and discover new movies every time they come to visit.

Movielink, the leading broadband movie download service, offers an extensive selection of new and classic hit movies, foreign films and hard-to-find, indie titles. Using ChoiceStream’s personalization, Movielink will enable its customers to discover new movies and find familiar titles quickly and easily. Beginning on the home page, Movielink will offer ‘Recommendations for You,’ a personalized set of movie titles that are based on the customer’s own preferences. This feature will ensure that no matter how frequently a customer visits the Movielink home page, he/she will always find a rich supply of new and interesting titles to watch next.
In addition, Movielink will offer its customers two popular ChoiceStream features that make finding the right movie fun and easy:
• ‘Sort by Relevance’ on the movie genre pages: Instead of scrolling a long, alphabetical list of ‘Action’ titles, customers will be presented with a list of action movies suited to their particular tastes.
• ‘More Like This’ Titles: As a customer browses and selects movies, similar movie titles will appear so that the customer always has relevant choices at his/her fingertips.

“To help our customers sort through our vast inventory of new releases and classics, we’re working closely with ChoiceStream to offer best of breed personalization,” said Jim Ramo, CEO of Movielink. “As a pay-per-view service, it’s important that we build trust with our consumer that they’ll always find movies and videos they’ll want to watch at Movielink. With ChoiceStream’s patent-pending technology, consumers will receive personalized recommendations based on their own tastes, making it easy for them to find and download the right movie.”
Helping Consumers Uncover Hidden Video
As the availability of digital content grows, the most popular movies are pushed to the forefront while archived and niche programming content often gets overlooked. Akimbo Systems, established with the vision of using the Internet to directly connect video content providers to consumers’ television sets, selected ChoiceStream to connect its consumers to the most relevant video based on their interests.

ChoiceStream will power the recommendations presented on the front page and genre pages of Akimbo.com, and also extend to The Akimbo Guide on the TV set. In the world of IPTV, where all content is available all the time, personalized recommendations and tools that allow consumers to ‘sort by relevance’ are particularly useful to the consumer who is trying to find the right movie from the thousands of titles available.
“ChoiceStream’s personalization solution will add another dimension to the search techniques, RSS feeds and other advanced technology that we’ve built into the Akimbo Guide, helping our subscribers discover new programming based on their own preferences,” said Josh Goldman, CEO of Akimbo Systems. “ChoiceStream helps our customers uncover content that they might not have otherwise been aware of by making recommendations based on individual interests rather than the typical popularity contest. This level of personalization will help foster greater subscriber satisfaction and retention.”
Proven Superior in the World’s Largest Networks
ChoiceStream’s ability to deliver the most accurate personalization is the result of its innovative approach. ChoiceStream gains a true understanding of each consumer’s preferences – why people choose what they choose - and combines it with knowledge gleaned across multiple sites and more than 30 million users. ChoiceStream combines this understanding with a deep knowledge of the content, whether movies, music, TV programs, sports, games, or other media. ChoiceStream’s personalization solutions offer interactive media companies what other solutions can only claim:
• 1-to-1 personalized recommendations that promote discovery
• Relevant recommendations for all users – even first-time visitors
• True scalability

Instead of using a pattern-matching, or collaborative filtering approach to personalization, ChoiceStream bases recommendations on consumers’ actual preferences – on the reasons they like what they like – enabling companies to dig deeper into their inventory and make meaningful recommendations that match consumers’ interests. Traditional approaches to personalization rely solely on clickstream data, which is notoriously unreliable, or require large amounts transaction data that is often missing from back catalog or non-mainstream content. These ‘long tail’ content recommendations – often the most useful and the most profitable – are brought to light only by ChoiceStream’s personalization solution. ChoiceStream’s licensable software solution is automated and proven to deliver 1-to-1 personalization to millions of consumers simultaneously for some of the world’s largest sites and services.

About ChoiceStream
ChoiceStream, the leading personalization solutions provider, delivers real relevance to consumers and real results to businesses providing services online, on TV and on mobile devices. Relied on by the world’s largest networks, including AOL and Yahoo!, ChoiceStream’s patent-pending personalization solutions and expert client services build brand, increase retention and drive profitability by automatically delivering the most relevant content and products to each consumer. For more information, please visit www.choicestream.com.

About Movielink
Movielink (www.movielink.com) is an online movie download service offering U.S. broadband customers an extensive selection of recently released films and classic movies covering every genre, from action, comedy, drama, family and romance to sci-fi, horror and thrillers. The service is owned and operated by Movielink, LLC, a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Movielink content offerings are drawn from the current releases and vast libraries of those studios as well as from those of Walt Disney Pictures, 20th Century Fox and leading independent studios.

About Akimbo
With the Akimbo Service, your wish is on demand™. Akimbo was named “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science and accepted 2005 Digital World Innovations and CES Best of Innovations 2005 awards. With 12 patent applications featuring more than 150 patent claims, Akimbo is the first company to deliver digital-quality video-on-demand to any television via a broadband-Internet connection. Akimbo has offices in San Mateo, Calif. and is a privately held company funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sprout Group and Zone Ventures. For more information, visit www.akimbo.com.



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