Tailoring Recommendations to Groups of Viewers on Smart TV: A Real-Time Profile Generation Approach

The recommender systems predict and calculate user preferences for recommendations. However, such predictions and calculations are neither accurate nor viable in the context of smart TV due to the reasons that it is a lean-back, non-personalized device, and normally enjoyed in groups. Hence, group recommendations have utmost importance, specifically from the perspectives of watching smart TV. The existing group recommendation techniques predict the individual’s preferences and then create a virtual group profile for recommendations. However, identifying and satisfying every group member is challenging. Numerous techniques have been proposed, such as face detection and recognition systems, but these systems lead to security and privacy issues. This paper proposes a smart TV-based recommender system that aims to identify the individuals and group members from their “age,” “gender,” and “number” information to overcome the biases that occur due to predictions and estimations of user’s preferences. The study proposes a novel formula and age-gender matrix for generating anonymous, consolidated, and secure profiles, including group profiles on a smart TV. This study further proposes a novel method for finding a dominant character in a group by utilizing the user’s ratings. Results show that the group decision has a significant impact on supplying social metadata, such as ratings, comments, etc., which in turn improve recommendation results. For materializing the proposed work, smart TV’s processing, storage, and camera are utilized. The prototypical implementation has been tested and analyzed with improved recommendation results and viewer(s) satisfaction.