beeTV raises $8 million

Milan-based TV recommendation service wants to deliver targeted ads to our set top boxes

There aren’t many intelligent recommendation services helping us figure out what to watch on TV.  You sort of pick and choose what you want to view based on personal preferences, or in my case, are somehow convinced to watch American Idol by your signficant other.  So if we are picking and choosing what we are viewing on our televisions, is there a plethora of incredible programming we are missing out on because nobody is recommending it to us?  beeTV, a new TV recommendation system, hopes to alleviate our lost television souls.

Milan-based beeTV, has raised $8 million in Series B funding today from Innogest, the largest VC firm in Italy.  Macro Pinciroli, CEO of Innogest said, "This is the single largest investment our firm has ever made.”  beeTV plans to use the funding to become the default entry stystem for television viewers ino their world of TV entertainment, expanding sales into the U.S. and the Far East.  

beeTV is basically a platform installed into set top boxes, sort of as a home page when a person turns on their TV’s.  It’s called beeSTBox.  beeTV saids its revolutionary technology pushes relevant content through this ‘personalized channel,’ while automatically anticipating viewer needs and desires, taking into account context, schedule, behavior, and even mood of the viewer.   Through learning this behavior, beeTV plans to be a platform for targeted advertising campaigns.

In addition to beeSTBox, beeTV also has mobile and Internet applications which function in the same manner, and using the same, proprietary, contextual matching algorithm.  

Gavin Potter, formerly of IBM, is heading the algorithm team responsible for the recommendation technology.  He comes from IBM and was known as, “just a guy in a garage.”

Here's what beeSTBox looks like:

Here's beeMobile:

And, beeWeb: