Long before The Filter existed as a business it was an idea...

Almost a decade ago Peter Gabriel, the musician and digital pioneer, imagined a future of infinite choice. He predicted a world in which people would access any entertainment, anywhere at any time. Rather than being enriched in a world of infinite choice we would become overwhelmed. "When many of us are drowning in choice," he said, "we are going to need smart filters..."

Indeed, as the web grew bigger and faster, volumes of content increased exponentially. And, sure enough, the challenges of navigation and discovery soon became an obstacle to enjoyment.

In 2004, Peter was introduced to the physicist and software entrepreneur, Martin Hopkins. This was a man, who shared Peter's vision, but had also developed a solution. As a passionate music fan, Martin had designed a piece of software to manage his music collection. The programme learned about his tastes and, using artificial intelligence, offered playlists and recommendations.

The two men joined forces with the venture capital specialist, Eden Ventures and The Filter was born... Successful trials of a playlist desktop application and a recommendations website quickly showed how effective and reliable the technology was, even with large volumes and different formats. New user interface tools and applications were launched and vast amounts of consumption and catalogue data were gathered and crunched. The Filter began to attract attention from industry commentators and, crucially, interest from commercial partners grew.

And today...

The Filter uses its world-leading recommendations and relevance systems to help content owners, publishers and aggregators around the world maximise their content and services. The Filter is proven to increase usage and engagement which in turn improves margins... making entertainment services more efficient and competitive. With video, music, applications and games, The Filter consistently out-performs editorial and automated recommendations and crucially, outputs can be skewed or biased to meet specific business goals.

One day, all entertainment will be optimised this way. Until then, The Filter is unique.