User:Eddiewang25/sandbox

Likewise is an American private company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The company develops, hosts, and markets a platform to help users find content recommendations for movies, TV, books, and podcasts. The service is available on iOS, Android, and web.

The company was launched in October 2017 by a team of ex-Microsoft employees with financial backing from Bill Gates.

History
The idea for Likewise was originally conceived by Larry Cohen, the former Microsoft communications chief, who is now CEO of Gates Ventures, as a way to remember and find recommendations for restaurants, TV shows, movies, books and more from both friends and in-house experts. The company was funded with full backing from Bill Gates and later brought on Ian Morris as CEO with the objective to “help people quickly discover great recommendations, share them with their friends and keep them in one place.” The Likewise platform notably does not feature a rating systems in order to preserve a positive recommendation-focused environment for users.

Likewise's early growth was fueled in part by its notable influencers including Bill Gates and Melinda Gates who regularly post book and movie recommendations on the platform.

2020 Pandemic
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Likewise experienced a large surge in app usage and adoption with usage increasing 400% and new users doubling without additional marketing effort.

Community Recommendations
The Likewise platforms supports social networking functionality that allows users to create, share, and engage with their own saved lists of content. The platform also supports community driven asks for users to suggest shows on behalf of one another.

Content Discovery
Likewise supports content discovery across movies, TV shows, books, podcasts, and more. The platform leverages machine learning and AI to help predict and suggest relevant content for users based off their prior product engagement.

Likewise TV
Likewise launched its Apple TV app in October of 2019 to allow users to stream saved TV shows and movies directly onto their TV from any supported streaming service. Similar Android TV and Fire TV apps were released in July 2020 to support mobile app to TV streaming on alternative platforms.

Likewise is currently available as a free app on the following platforms:
 * iOS
 * Android
 * web
 * Apple TV
 * Android TV
 * Fire TV