Discovery Enhances Customer Experience Using Amazon Personalize

Viewers are watching more content than ever before. Their expectations for nearly endless content choices anytime, anywhere, and on any screen are driving business and operational changes for media companies. Multinational television company Discovery Inc. seized the chance to help its customers find curated content that matches their specific interests.

Turning to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Discovery Inc. (Discovery) built a streaming service, discovery+, using Amazon Personalize, a fully managed machine learning service that goes beyond rigid static rule-based recommendation systems and deploys custom machine learning models to deliver highly customized recommendations to customers. Discovery has a wide variety of content that appeals to a broad audience base. Instead of offering viewers generic content, Discovery used the machine learning–powered recommendations of Amazon Personalize to customize the viewer experience and improve the overall customer journey. 

On AWS, Discovery was able to achieve personalized content experiences for individual viewers. The company also now offers a flexible and scalable solution in discovery+ that works with its existing infrastructure. In addition, rapid deployment supports Discovery’s desire to deliver content against time-to-market goals. “Our goal was to build a product with a very fast time to market and a flexible and scalable solution. Amazon Personalize was a really solid fit,” says Haris Husain, vice president head of product and data science at Discovery.

Discovery Inc. is a multinational mass media television company based in New York City. Established in 1985, the company now operates many factual and lifestyle television brands, including the Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, and TLC. Available in 220 countries and territories and nearly 50 languages, Discovery delivers over 8,000 hours of original programming each year. The company launched discovery+ in the United States in January 2021. This direct-to-consumer streaming service features television series, movies, and original programming.