Peter Gabriel’s Discovery Engine Strikes DVD Deal

The Peter Gabriel-backed personal music recommendation engine The Filter is moving into the DVD market.

The company has signed up to provide Belgian online DVD home rental service DVDPost with its own movie recommendation widget.

Developed by physicist Martin Hopkins using Bayesian mathematics, The Filter is powered by an engine that provides a holistic approach to recommendations – filtering out irrelevant content and only filtering in content that reflects an individual’s tastes and moods through unique algorithms.

Basically, Gabriel’s year-old digital toy chronicles what online entertainment you like, sends that info to the boys in the math department, who then come up with a comprehensive list of music and movie choices you should enjoy.

Pierre Demolin, CEO of DVDPost, is keen to employ The Filter’s technology to help deliver personalized service to his website’s subscribers.

“At DVDPost we recognise how critical it is to build user engagement and connect our customers to the movies they want to watch,” said Demolin, in a statement. “With a library of over 22,300 movie titles, which is seeing continual growth with every new release, the choice of movies is at risk of becoming overwhelming for our subscribers.”

For the Grammy award-winning Gabriel, who co-founded super-group Genesis and recorded classic hits like “In Your Eyes” and “Sledgehammer,” The Filter isn’t his first tech venture. He co-founded On Demand Distribution, once the largest digital-music service in Europe, which sold in 2000 to Loudeye (acquired by Nokia in ’06) and also develops games on CD-ROM.

The Filter’s investors are Gabriel’s Real World Group and Eden Ventures.

Is The Filter an online navigation tool you’d consider to help discover content you like? Or are there already enough filtering systems for online content?

Source: sourcewire.com