Today, BBC’s R&D team announced a five-year initiative to use machine learning to work out what audiences want to watch. To accomplish this, the team is partnering up with data scientists and experts from UK universities as well as media and tech companies based in Europe and internationally.

The Data Science Research partnership intends to create “a more personal BBC” that can entertain in new ways. Researchers will analyze user data and apply algorithms to get marketing and media insights about audiences’ preferences. The details are vague for now, but the team says it plans to use machine learning on its own digital and traditional broadcasting content to gain new insights.

“As we reinvent the BBC, we can see the opportunities that data and machine learning are opening up for us, our creative talent and our audiences,” says Matthew Postgate, the BBC’s chief technology and product officer.

BBC announced eight colleges that it’s partnering with: the universities of Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and Surrey, Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London, Ulster University, and University College London.

In an effort to modernize its workforce, the BBC also announced that it’s rolling entry-level to advanced master’s degree courses in data science for employees. Samantha Chadwick, head of partnerships at BBC R&D, says that the team is hoping to “train a new generation of data scientists on real media problems to create new audience experiences.”

All of this sounds like BBC’s attempts to modernize and come closer to what Netflix already does: curate content for the particular niches that interest its audiences and then using machine learning to suggest new shows and films to watch.