Sep. 30, 2009 (PR Newswire) --

YEHUD, Israel and PORTLAND, Ore., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Jinni, an innovative search and recommendation service for premium video content, today announced the appointment of Michael J. Pohl as chief executive officer. Pohl brings 25 years of telecommunications industry experience, and a decade of focus on next-generation services such as on-demand and advanced advertising.

"Mike is respected for his ability to really understand the business ramifications of new technologies," said Yosi Glick, Jinni co-founder and president. "We believe Jinni's holistic approach, combining semantic search, personalized recommendations, and innovative taste profiling, will redefine entertainment discovery. Mike is the perfect choice to help us bring this solution to market."

Jinni's solution addresses today's entertainment challenges in sifting through large, on-demand entertainment libraries and consumer expectations for a personalized experience. Jinni powers an intuitive and flexible discovery process that helps consumers find what fits their moods and personal tastes at that moment. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution includes hosted services and application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable content discovery on PCs, set-top boxes and game consoles.

"Content discovery today is based on keywords searches that don't factor in the personal and emotional aspects of what a consumer wants to watch," said Pohl. "Jinni's intelligent approach, based on proprietary algorithms, reflects the way people think and talk about entertainment, and shifts the spotlight from rigid categories and keyword search to results that match a real consumer's tastes. For example, a search for "funny action movie with a surprise twist" or "smart love story" will yield real results."

"Our taste engine also creates a unique model of the consumer's likes and dislikes, which is the basis for recommendations and a highly personalized experience," continued Pohl. "For example, Jinni can tell that I like clever gangster movies about cons and scams, as well as witty urban romantic movies about opposites that attract."

Jinni's capabilities were showcased in several partnerships at the recent IBC 2009 show in Amsterdam. NDS demonstrated bringing content discovery to a linear Hollywood movie channel by enabling customers to get recommendations for more movies like one they've seen and enjoyed. Jinni collaborated with OpenTV to bring next-generation search and recommendation functionality to the television allowing viewers to find content across multiple sources as well as get programming recommendations based on personal tastes, taking the headache out of choosing what to watch on TV.