Gatsby TV CEO Gatsby Frimpong Talks AI, Streaming Content Discovery, and The “Paradox of Choice”
Streaming has a major programming discoverability problem. The hassle of finding the content you want as quickly and seamlessly as possible has grown along with the sheer amount of streaming programming available on not only the major platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Disney but also within the rapidly expanding Free Ad Supported Television (FAST) space and its platforms such as Tubi, Xumo, Pluto, Rakuten, and The Roku Channel.
Most streaming viewers are now well aware of the frustrations of the seemingly “endless scroll” while looking for content. Searchability is also influenced by algorithms designed to steer users towards paid subscription content when the content sought out may often be free. To outdo these big streaming TV platforms, Gatsby TV, a new tech startup, has built an app that utilizes AI to generate a unique algorithm directly personalized for the user, applying suggestions from friends and family.
Gatsby TV is designed to unlock all TV shows and film content anyone could ever want. Its highly personalized approach searches for shows and movies across all streaming platforms, which users can add to a watchlist and recommend to friends.
I met with Gatsby TV CEO Gatsby Frimpong to discuss his professional background, which includes engineering jobs at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, what led him to create the app, how it helps customers save money, the AI foundation models it uses, and more.
I started by asking Frimpong to discuss his professional background and how it helped him create Gatsby TV.
“I've been in either product or engineering, both in hardware and software and in DevOps at most of the major FAANG companies,” Frimpong said. “And it's allowed me to get an understanding of consumer technology advertising and just technology as a whole. Essentially for me, it's been a good practice ground for me to try some ideas. And eventually I said, ‘Okay, you know what? I'm going to go out into the world and free myself from some of these big companies and try something on my own.”
The “Paradox of Choice” and how Gatsby TV helps to overcome it
I asked Frimpong what the impetus was for him to create Gatsby TV and if it was driven by his own personal frustrations with streaming discoverability.
Frimpong said, “I feel like millions of people in America, if not billions of people around the world have so much content that we can watch on a daily basis. But what seems interesting is that, although we have so much choice, it becomes harder and harder to actually find something to watch. And I felt like this is this very interesting paradox. You have this ability to watch anything you want, but at the same time, you may seem to watch nothing. And so I said to myself, ‘What is that? Why does that exist?’ And what I had come down to is that it was this whole idea of the way recommendation system works.” He mentioned his own personal frustrations with coming home after a long day of work and not being able to settle on anything to watch with his partner. “And I thought that that was pretty crazy, considering I was paying for eight different streaming video-on-demand subscriptions,” he said. “So I decided to make a difference and come up with a solution.”
How Gatsby TV uses AI and real-life recommendations to enhance discoverability
While researching solutions to the discoverability issue, Frimpong found that most people find programming the old-fashioned way: via word of mouth, at the workplace water cooler, lunches, or group chats.
“All that the streaming video on demand platforms do essentially is just remind us of something someone told us in real life,” Frimpong noted. “And so we said to ourselves, well, how can we marry this offline experience with something online where someone can tell you something offline at lunch or whatever it may be, and you can easily remember it? We came up with an app that allows you to send recommendations to and from friends so that the next time they sit down to find something to watch, all they have to do is open up the app and say, ‘Oh yeah, X person was talking about Y show the last time I saw them. Let me just go ahead and play it. And the Gatsby TV app will actually show you where you can watch any TV show or movie for free, or via subscription, or where you can buy it.”
I wondered what type of foundation model Gatsby TV uses for its AI.
“This is something that we're still building,” he said. “A lot of people are using OpenAI, but we're trying to get away from that. We're actually still in the exploratory phase because we don't want one company to be able to control our destiny. If anything, we'd love to control our own. So we're looking at open-source solutions. The one that's being spearheaded by Facebook primarily in order to build our model.”
The ways Gatsby TV helps viewers save money
“In what ways would you say that the app ultimately saves the customer money by searching through these TV services? Do you have any data on that yet?” I asked.
“Whenever you look for a title, the Gatsby TV app will tell you [it is] available for free here, it’s available via subscription here, and this is where you can buy it,” he said. “And that's huge because I can’t tell you how many times I went on Apple TV or Google thinking it's not available via one of my subscriptions. And then, I found out a few weeks later that it was actually available via one of my subscriptions. I think one of the sad things about the internet is people believe its [search capabilities are] objective, but we have to keep in mind that Apple, Google, and some of these companies that do actually work on aggregation are in fierce competition with other companies like Amazon Prime video. And so maybe Apple isn't showing you that it's available on Amazon. Maybe they're trying to get you to go to iTunes.”
Building public awareness about the lack of objectivity in search algorithms
“What is Gatsby TV doing in terms of any particular marketing campaigns or pushes to build up awareness that this is actually something that can be solved?” I asked.
“First and foremost, we try to educate people on the fact that search algorithms are not objective,” Frimpong said. “They're actually very subjective. And [content owners] like YouTube, Apple TV+, etc., are going to – whether they like to admit it or not – affect the way they present information for you when it comes to their competitors.”
He further elaborated that Gatsby TV aims to build consumer awareness of these issues by demonstrating their universal search results compared to non-objective results provided by more traditional online searches, especially regarding revealing free programming. “At the end of the day, there's far more free TV out there than people realize,” he said. “We try to educate people as much as possible, and it's via the product itself and our marketing, too.”
Find Gatsby TV on Instagram @tv_gatsby.
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