Video is the emerging format for online consumption and advertising budgets.

The UK online advertising spend has now overtaken TV advertising spend, and eclipsed Radio spend long ago. The eyeballs are on the computer screen. They are looking for interactive choices on what they watch, and when they watch it.

Whilst YouTube is a large gallery of video content - both the professional and amateur - the BBC has pioneered the iPlayer tool where audiences can catch up with their favourite programmes when they want to. Broadcasters' ability to broadcast to everyone simultaneously has given way to consumer choice that asynchronously watches their chosen video content.

Grapeshot worked with the iPlayer team in 2008 to innovate a new recommendation tray that suggests other iPlayer episodes for each user to watch. Each programme has a special RSS feed that describes the episode title, description, artists, genre and BBC channel, which are all important information attributes which Grapeshot ingested into a live recommendation webservice.

As users downloaded an episode, Grapeshot was able to collate keywords around each BBC cookie ID, to understand the habits of anonymous users and thereby impact the recommendations made to each user when they next viewed the recommendation tray.

The Grapeshot recommendation tray was a research project for the BBC and has not been put live.

Whilst Grapeshot does not power the BBC's recommendation tray at present, it has been working on other innovative ways to suggest the best viewing to a user. For example, when reading a web page about Food, the Grapeshot system can recommend the two or three most relevant i-Player programmes for you to watch, all about food and cuisine.

As users browse the internet, Grapeshot has an automated way of converting the essence of the web page into an i-Player recommendation, which finds the most contextually relevant programmes to watch, related to that page's content. Grapeshot in effect has created an automatic TV Guide responding to each page, or the user's reading habits, based on keywords.

Unique Channels free the publisher from the shackles of having to deliver content in a hard-wired editorial section.

Video format ads already carry a price premium for their creation and trafficking. Grapeshot can help publishers determine the best video advertising to be placed on particular pages, and optimise brand interactivity with the video ad format - by ensuring contextual and personal relevance is included in the video-ad serving logic.