Using social media data for online television recommendation services at RTÉ Ireland

Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) is the public service television and radio broadcaster in Ireland. Through on demand video services, RTÉ allows their users to catch up on television broadcasts via the RTÉ Player. The company interacts with their users by means of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Aiming to improve user engagement and in order to deal with the potential information overload caused by a broad catalogue such as RTÉ’s, a recommendation service would be a desirable feature for the RTÉ Player. However, the distinctive requirements of this use case, such as (a) lack of ratings, (b) lack of user sessions data, and (c) limited lifespan of items (i.e., available videos), keep us from applying traditional recommendation approaches. Yet, we believe that immersed within social media data, there is valuable information about user viewing preferences, and that this information can be used as input for Recommendation Services. This paper examines the use of social media data for personalization in the RTÉ industrial use case, giving special focus to the use of Twitter data for Recommendation Systems.