TV Scout is/was an experimental personalized TV Guide. It was developed at GMD in cooperation with the German TV TODAY magazine. The goal of the project was to help users in creating their personal TV schedule for a day or a week.
A similar system was developed more recently by the Dutch Telematics Research Institute.
TV Scout is a somewhat typical recommender system. These systems assume that the user’s interest is stable. Through responses from individual users or from user groups the systems try to learn what the user’s interest is and what information corresponds to that interest.
Something that is special in TV Scout is that TV program information is short-lived. Every day new data may be added to the database, and data about past programs becomes obsolete.
It is essential that the system require very little effort on behalf of the users.
Filtering of programs can only be done based on information provided by TV Today, and that is in essence what the TV stations provide.
Since users plan only for one day or so the system concentrates on providing recommendations for “today”.