A little over a year since the beta release of its conversational AI search and discovery tool, Cineverse is making cineSearch commercially available to business customers. The Los Angeles startup says its AI-powered framework “solves” the content-hunt quandary for digital networks and streaming services, finding programming across all streaming platforms. Cineverse is making cineSearch available for commercial licensing to OEMs and streaming platforms via the company’s own sales team and through Google Cloud Marketplace. CineSearch was developed using Google’s AI ecosystem — specifically Vertex AI platform and the Gemini 2.0 Pro model.

“Cineverse believes that it has come up with the streaming video business’ Holy Grail,” writes StreamTV Insider, describing how the company “has reimagin[ed] the very limited traditional paradigm of searching based on keywords” in a four-year project with a 90-person engineering team.

“For more than 65,000 movies dating back to 1975, as well as countless TV show episodes spanning to the same era, the whole concept of metadata had to be rethought,” StreamTV Insider explains, emphasizing the utility of AI and “artificial-intelligence terms that go far beyond the limits of a programming synopsis.”

“This allows us to give recommendations based on the intrinsic nature of the film rather than keyword matching from the synopsis, which you see in traditional metadata,” Cineverse President of Technology and Chief Product Officer Tony Huidor told StreamTV.

Los Angeles Times writes that the cineSearch app is “highly customizable based on each streaming platform or OEM’s needs,” and that Cineverse hopes it will “transform the way their users interact with any streaming service.”

In a news release, Cineverse says the product “eliminates ‘binge scrolling’” with content recommendations that take into account “the user’s mood along with the content’s theme, popularity, quality, tone, setting, style, music score, plot, micro-genre, among many other traits.” In addition, things like previous viewing history, likes/dislikes, saved watchlists, geographic location, calendar and other variables are factored in.

Cineverse claims poor search costs the industry money. “One third of streaming subscribers cancel a service due to poor discovery; viewers spend an average of 10+ minutes searching for what to watch, with 20 percent of viewers abandoning their search,” the company’s research has found.

An investor relations release touts Cineverse’s scalable Matchpoint content distribution infrastructure as cost-effective and efficient. “We’re already powering a massive business for ourselves and our partners with Matchpoint,” Cineverse CEO Chris McGurk said in the communique, adding that “the next phase is about scaling this success even further.”

A reference design of cineSearch is currently available to try for free at cinesearch.com.