July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Social-TV check-in startup GetGlue has lured away Evan Krauss from his post as executive vice president of sales at Shazam so he can become GetGlue’s new president, the company announced today.

GetGlue allows users to check in to whatever TV show or movie they’re currently watching, providing stickers (aka badges) for those who watch during a premiere or opening weekend. It’s still got a decently large following of over 4 million registered users, according to the company. (I have no idea how many of those are active monthly users, though, but considering the number of competitors in the social TV space, GetGlue is definitely one of the largest players.)

Normally, we don’t cover hiring announcements, but in this case, it’s newsworthy. GetGlue is coming off a failed merger with social-TV startup Viggle, which fell apart back in January. The deal between those two companies made sense because GetGlue had a great relationship with many entertainment companies and really didn’t have a clear game plan for how to monetize its popularity. Also, lots of other social-TV services had also started consolidating or pivoting, such as Dijit’s purchase of Miso and more recently Fanhattan’s dip into hardware with its Fan TV set-top box.

That said, GetGlue’s hiring of Krauss was a smart move because it should help the company figure out how to increase monetization through promotions and second-screen advertising sales. Krauss has a long history of working in digital media that spans two decades. He’s held positions at Yahoo, AOL, Excite, JumpTap, and Looksmart. His most recent position at Shazam was focused on helping the company grab a piece of the TV industry’s advertising budget, as VentureBeat previously reported.

“Evan is a very experienced leader, thinker, and a passionate contributor to the second-screen and social-TV revolution,” said GetGlue founder and chief executive officer Alex Iskold in a statement. “Evan pioneered innovative products [and] native advertising models and created companies we admire. We are fortunate to have him on board, defining and scaling GetGlue’s business.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hiding behind the scenes of many media events that integrate social media activity is Mass Relevance. Such is the case with tonight’s live preshow for the season six premiere of HBO’s hit vampire drama, True Blood.

HBO is running a 15-minute live show with the full cast that gives fans the opportunity to ask questions or show their love for True Blood via tweets, Vine videos, photos, and more. You’ll see all of this onscreen, but there’s no mention of Mass Relevance itself.

“We aren’t branding ourselves as the way to sort and curate social content for TV networks and brands, but that’s exactly what our platform can do,” Mass Relevance chief executive officer and cofounder Sam Decker told VentureBeat in response to why the company isn’t more visible despite providing the tech for some very high-profile events (such as Obama’s Twitter Town Halls, CNN election coverage, The Grammys, and many more). “Our clients want to develop their own strategies for interacting with fans, and the fact that we stay out of the way — I think — is a testament to our platform.”

The company’s platform allows highly media companies to manage the flow of social information they’re consistently getting hit with. It takes social-data streams from various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and others) and weaves them into a single console for clients. From there, you can set filters by word/hashtag, audience demographic (age range, gender, geography), media or social network, and so on — basically fine-tuning all that social data for a specific purpose.

As for the True Blood season premiere preshow, Mass Relevance’s platform will help HBO’s social media managers single out the best questions to ask from fans that followed the rules issued this morning. (For example, things like changing your avatar and using a particular hashtag.) Everything is displayed from the HBO Connect webpage, which was set up last week to build anticipation for the premiere.

So why exactly would a company like HBO want to bother with preempting its original programming with a live interactive show powered by social media content? Well, first of all, it’s a way for HBO to gauge how interested its fans are in the content it’s producing. A high level of activity from fans may indicate that HBO will want to continue producing the show as it likely guarantees that people are happy with their monthly HBO subscription.

Decker said that in the future, Mass Relevance clients like HBO will probably start to integrate more social content such as Twitter/Instagram photos or Vine videos. And while HBO isn’t concerned with advertising, other events have been successful in selling its interactive platform to advertisers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Who needs a second screen when you can use one screen to watch, share, and see what others are saying about life television entertainment? Today SimulTV launched a new online TV-viewing app that integrates social, eliminating the need for two screens.

“SimulTV puts the social in TV – literally – by merging the second screen with the first,” the company says.

The second screen is the biggest phenomena in traditional media, supposedly. Forrester says that 85 percent of tablet owners in the U.S. check social media while watching TV. It’s such a big phenomenon that TV Guide rolled out an app to see what’s playing, watch whatever’s on, and also tweet, post, and blog about it. And that Apple is rumored to be releasing a mini-TV tablet to enable an iOS-style second-screen experience.

Of course, when I go to watch TV, I go to chill, or to immerse myself in a story … not to tweet about it or share. But I am, admittedly, not 20 anymore.

For those who want to stay socially connected while watching the big game or the last episode of can’t-miss-TV, SimulTV’s solution is to combine both screens, right on the web. So your football game, Twitter conversations, Facebook messages, online search, and text and voice chat with others on SimulTV who are watching the same thing as you.

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

I tried the service myself, and besides the fact that it’s Flash-based — at least the code that asks for control of your microphone and webcam in order to participate in on-site chat — and fairly processor-intensive, it seems useful and a better solution than a standard two-device second-screen setup.

Currently, there are only a few channels, but by this summer, SimulTV promises to have more than 100 channels, including ”top channels” from Latin America, China, Japan and Europe, plus 5,000 video-on-demand titles. The service is HD-quality, with picture-in-picture for the truly ADHD social TV aficionados, and according to the company, takes only half the bandwidth of typically required.

Most importantly, however, SimulTV is a service that — depending on the channels the company actually brings on this summer — allows you to cut the cord and simply use your computer or tablet to watch TV.

The service will be free initially, and eventually will cost between $5 and $20.

Image credit: John Koetsier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dijit Media is delving further into the “social TV” market, acquiring GoMiso to go along with its NextGuide “hyper-personalized” user interface app for the iPad.

The deal gives Dijit more options to improve social TV, which is all about using your iPad and other connected devices to enjoy your TV watching with others. Dijit will continue to support GoMiso’s Miso and Sideshow products, but it plans to shut down GoMiso’s Quips app and service. Social TV hopes to tackle the problem of having hundreds of viewing choices and nobody to watch a show with. With so many cable, satellite or internet video channels to watch, it’s harder than ever to find what you want, especially with the antiquated screen guides that were designed in the age when you had less than 100 channels.

“Miso was the first to define the burgeoning social TV space and became a major contributor to where the industry is today,” said Jeremy Toeman, the chief executive of Digit Media. “We’ve built the most powerful TV guide and discovery platform for consumers and the TV industry alike, and this acquisition will give us more tools to give our users a guide experience that redefines how people discover content.”

Diji already offers a guide to both live television and streaming TV. It presents a single view of different services you can tap — Netflix, HuluPlus, or iTunes. But it takes this a step further by offering interest-based personalized channels based on the tastes that you have identified in your Facebook profile and “likes.”

Many screen guides offer ways to search for shows or actors, but using a remote control for that purpose is time-consuming. NextGuide is all about finding content for you that you might not realize you want to watch. The guide fetches movie art to form a mosaic of tiles that you can tap on the iPad’s touchscreen. Beyond categories such as “comedy” or “drama,” it also suggests categories based on your preferences, such as”football,” “San Francisco,” “Lady Gaga,” or “Charlie Sheen.” To see what is available in that category, you tap on the tile. It’s like your own sherpa for TV.

The guide’s purpose is to answer the question “What should I watch next?” It lets you find shows on the TV or on an iPad. It has search capability but can also deliver alerts to you. The app also starts recordings on the home DVRs of DirecTV customers.

Rival services include Fanhattan, an app that helps you find videos on a variety of sources. Dijit has 10 employees, while GoMiso’s sole employee is founder Somrat Niyogi, who will join Dijit as an advisor.

“We began the journey of inventing Social TV over three years ago, and think Dijit’s the right home for our users and the platforms we’ve built,” said Niyogi.  ”There’s a lot we’ve learned about consumers and the ever-changing nature of TV, and believe that the NextGuide platform is poised for huge growth ahead.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

TV loyalty service Viggle has agreed to acquire social TV app GetGlue for $25 million and 48.3 million shares in stock, the companies announced today.

“With this deal, we are combining very experienced and creative product, engineering, and management teams that will continue to build great user experiences and provide industry leading platforms for consumers, networks, and advertisers,” Viggle CEO Robert Sillerman said in a statement. “We will also be vastly increasing the Viggle user base and quadrupling our network partnerships.

New York City-based GetGlue was founded in 2007 and lets its 3.2 million registered users “check-in” to TV shows or movies they are watching and stay better connected to their favorite programs. Viggle, which was only launched in January, lets users get rewards like iTunes and Amazon credit for watching TV programs. Viggle has 1.2 million registered users.

GetGlue’s 34 employees will be brought over to Viggle, including GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold, who will take a senior executive position and a slot on Viggle’s board of directors.

“GetGlue has built a social TV product that people love, and Viggle has become their favorite loyalty program for TV,” Iskold said in a statement. “Together we are positioned to deliver the next generation second screen experiences that delight and benefit users, networks, and major brands.”

GetGlue previously raised $24 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Rho Capital Partners, so this deal isn’t much of an exit. But there’s also the matter of the 48.3 million shares, which could have pushed the deal over the edge. Investors and Iskold may have simply found that consolidating teams and users of Viggle and GetGlue made the most sense to keep GetGlue growing.

Couple watching TV with tablet photo via Goodluz/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Looking to broaden its media research capabilities and connect the dots between Twitter and TV ratings, Nieslen today announced that it has acquired SocialGuide, a two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup specializing in social data around television content. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SocialGuide makes a consumer-facing web and mobile product that surfaces buzz around TV shows and movies and organizes content from 232 channels into a socially ranked viewing guide. The seed-funded startup also maintains a television analytics and audience measurement tool, which uses Twitter data, for networks and agencies. This product is what drew Nielsen’s interest to the company.

As part of the deal, SocialGuide will be integrated with NM Incite, the Nielsen and McKinsey & Company joint venture focused on social media analysis. The startup’s technology will be used in conjunction with NM Incite to help advertisers understand how social media impacts consumer behavior and TV ratings.

“The opportunity in social TV is too big to ignore, and there is a need for standard metrics and research to uncover the effect of social TV on programming and advertising strategies,” NM Incite CEO Andrew Somosi said. “TV networks are expanding their research, advertising, and engagement efforts across social media. The powerful combination of Nielsen, NM Incite, and SocialGuide will enable us to deliver unparalleled insights and capabilities to our TV and advertiser clients.”

This post was written by John Funge, cofounder and CEO of real-time big data processing company BrightContext.

For all the legitimate buzz about social TV, one mystery remains: why hasn’t it come about? Why are most social TV experiences basically Twitter feeds?

The answer has to do with a modern problem of “real-time big data”—which is to say, instantly consuming, routing, processing and broadcasting large volumes of data.

Have you ever considered how Twitter sends out 28 million messages almost instantly when Lady Gaga blows a kiss to her followers? Only a small collection of folks that rarely leave their desks at Twitter or the CIA can answer this question. But the answer is central to the future of social TV.

For the past 80 years TV has been a one-way broadcast communication. But the promise of social TV is that the audience will engage with each other (and with advertisers and show producers). Television won’t remain a one-way medium.

This social TV vision is irresistible. But how do you handle the potential real-time traffic load? Just as airports become overwhelmed at Thanksgiving, it’s the same with servers. For load-handling purposes, how many users you get per month matters less than how many you get per minute.

It’s easy to forget just how many people TV draws together at one time.  A rerun of The Big Bang Theory (not to mention events like the Super Bowl) can fill 30 Yankee stadiums of people all watching the same thing together.

For years, TV networks have dealt with traffic spikes on their web sites by using caching services like Akamai. But caching doesn’t work well with content that changes frequently. If you want the audience to hang out and participate for the length of a show –clicking, voting and commenting—you have a problem.

If two million people are watching a Two and Half Men rerun and 0.5% tap into a companion app, that’s like running a chat room with 10,000 people. The numbers will only increase as social TV becomes mainstream.

So why not let Facebook and Twitter deal with all this real-time data? To date, TV shows have done exactly that. Notwithstanding a few apps like GetGlue, social TV as we know it in 2012 is largely Twitter. In 2010, MTV set the bar with its excellent Twitter Tracker for the VMA Awards.  Since then, we’ve seen ever more variations on the concept. In fact, Twitter itself joined the trend–helping curate large live events including a partnership with NBC for the Olympics.

But social TV must move beyond Facebook and Twitter for two reasons. First, in order to excite audiences and remain competitive over time, social TV apps must become more ambitious, more differentiated, more tightly woven together with the linear content, more game-like, more creatively sponsored and more central to the business case for the TV show itself.

Second, as social TV becomes more integral to the business of television, social networks may represent more of a competitor than partner. The stakes are high as the market sorts out who will own these new direct relationships with the audience. Already, Twitter and Facebook have better insight into TV audiences than the programmers and distributors themselves. To unlock social TV’s full potential and preserve independence, app developers will need a new way to handle the torrential load of real-time data.

There are two reasons for hope, both of which have arrived only in the past few years: first, with cloud computing, engineers can deploy server capacity without needing to actually install physical servers into a data center. But cloud computing doesn’t help if the servers can’t work together. Luckily, new database approaches called “NoSQL” now make it possible to distribute database load across many more servers. In combination with cloud computing, NoSQL databases can handle the extreme levels of database write activity that a TV audience can generate.

The bottom line is this: it’s no longer crazy to imagine building a system that enables a million concurrent users to interact in real-time. That’s a big deal. As technical considerations fade into the background, the most creative producers will take social TV in directions we can barely imagine.

John Funge is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Brightcontext, a cloud-based platform that powers real-time, data stream processing. He has experience working in the TV broadcast industry and sold his last company to Scripps Networks, the company behind HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel. Funge also advises and invests in early-stage Internet and digital media ventures.

[Top image credit: Angela Waye/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

TV has always been social ­– from water cooler chatter around Game of Thrones recaps to Academy Awards results and Super Bowl games. We like to watch TV with others, talk about what we’ve just seen, and share our opinions about what transpired on the screen.

In the last few years, social media has satisfied our appetite for shared TV experiences, and our desire to share is still growing. Social media activity like tweets, Facebook updates and check-ins, has jumped significantly during prime time broadcast television – up 194% in April 2012 over the prior year. Currently, 50% of mobile users in the U.S. use their device while watching TV. Now family TV night can be anywhere with anyone.

Social media has become just as vital to TV as traditional advertisements, and marketers need to start thinking about the second and third screen experiences (including laptop, smartphone and tablets) to better capture the attention of consumers where they are already engaged ­– on mobile and social platforms.

Who’s really watching? While traditional television advertising still has a place in the marketing mix, brands can’t necessarily count on viewers to pay attention. If the audience is busy on their mobile device or computer while those ads air, the impact is muffled.

It is now more important than ever to create compelling and active advertising that is integrated with second and third screen experiences to capture and keep your audience’s attention.  A bevy of social sites are helping brands leverage multi-screen engagement by giving viewers special deals, exclusive content and interactive experiences. We’ve got our eye on them and have three tips on how brands should use them.

Offer viewers real deals and rewards for check-ins on Get Glue

Get Glue, a niche community around entertainment and media, lets users check-in to tell people what they’re planning to watch, or are currently watching, and earn rewards for doing so. It’s seen great initial success with the networks.

HBO’s Game Of Thrones saw massive buzz generation for the show’s premiere. Check-ins reached 50,000 on Get Glue, eventually crashing the server. Get Glue also reported 90,000 check-ins leading up to the premiere, letting friends know they planned to watch. For perspective, Mad Men’s season premiere had 22,000 check-ins and season 2 of The Walking Dead had 43,000. Many of those check-ins were also shared across user’s entire social graph.

Brands are starting to leverage this check-in concept by integrating it into their marketing campaigns and offering users discounts and exclusive content. Beyond incentivizing viewers with virtual “check-in” badges, brands are seeing effective engagement by giving away real prizes and rewards. Case in point, Get Glue and Entertainment Weekly partnered over the last year to reward audience check-ins with physical items rather than just virtual stickers.

The Gap also sponsored an engagement promotion last fall rewarding users who checked in to a series of Entertainment Weekly’s recommended fall programs. They received a virtual sticker that entitled them to 40% off a regularly-priced item at Gap stores the following month. Mobile phone company HTC sponsored a summer movie promotion as part of the EW/Get Glue Partnership. To enter, consumers checked in to EW’s Featured Films section of Get Glue, unlocking stickers that served as an entry into the sweepstakes to win a pair of movie tickets given away daily.

Gamify the consumption of media through points collection, awards and sweepstakes with Viggle

Viggle is an emerging loyalty program where users watch live TV programs, earn points and get rewards. It’s proving to be very effective competition for a viewer’s attention during commercial breaks. By providing viewers with contextually-relevant material like sweepstakes, an interactive game, or digital coupons, brands are driving viewers’ attention to content, and engaging directly with consumers.

Viggle uses audio recognition to identify what you’re watching and rewards points for those check-ins. Once a user has accumulated enough points, they can redeem them for various gift cards to stores like Old Navy and Starbucks. Some networks are using Viggle to offer higher point values to shows that need a boost or early in a new season before viewing habits solidify, encouraging regular viewers.

But other brands are experimenting with Viggle as well. As part of a wider Dove Men+Care’s March Madness ‘Journey To Comfort’ campaign, Viggle users who watched the brand’s videos and ads from the campaign were awarded with points. As audiences are more distracted by their multi-tasking, this kind of reward-based engagement is keeping brands from losing that moment with a consumer.

During big events like the Grammys and the Super Bowl, Viggle hosts Viggle LIVE events where users’ actions are worth more bonus points so they’re more attractive to engage with. During the Grammys, Viggle users could watch commercials and answer polls or trivia questions to earn points. Through a sponsorship, Bing incorporated a button within the Viggle app so users could search for answers to trivia questions and offered hints to help answer questions.

Develop engaging content by listening to your audience with IntoNow

Brands can leverage IntoNow as a channel to listen to what viewers are saying and create engaging content around relevant conversations in real time. IntoNow is a mobile app and, like Viggle, it uses audio recognition to identify what you’re watching. But unlike Viggle, it also audio fingerprints live television and OTT services like Netflix and Hulu and can tag repeats and old movies played on local channels. Similar to the other platforms, it allows for buzz building and sharing of what you’re watching with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Kraft’s Velveeta supplemented on air ads with display ads and a series of polls on the IntoNow interface during the Golden Globes in January. Velveeta Cheesy Skillet-branded polls pertained to celebrities, nominated films, and red carpet fashion. The success of their social TV campaign wasn’t just about getting ad clicks or having people download branded content on IntoNow, it was really about driving engagement. And the results were impressive: 27% of the audience in the app participated in the polls and there were 180 discussion threads about the brand’s content during the show.

To drive excitement and viewers to the last two episodes of this season’s Revenge, ABC and Lexus partnered to provide a sweepstakes prize. After checking in to one of the episodes, viewers could seeRevenge trivia, engage in conversations with friends, and share what they’re watching. Their check in also gave users a chance to win a vacation in the Hamptons to “live like Grayson for a week.”

Wrapping up

In addition to traditional media and advertising, and social media engagement on Facebook and Twitter, brands that start leveraging second and third screen apps will capture an active audience that uses mobile and social as a complement to their TV watching. There is an opportunity to engage audiences in deeper, more meaningful ways than traditional television advertising and by incentivizing viewers to engage with branded content, marketers are helping raise awareness and connecting to consumers in relevant ways.

Sara Kowal is the vice president of product innovation at ePrize, a global leader in digital engagement that incentivizes consumer behavior across mobile, social and web for the world’s largest brands. Follow her @sekowal or @ePrize.

Photo via Scott Macklin/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Flingo, one of the largest smart TV app publishers, has received another $1 million in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban, bringing its total first round to $8 million.

As the company tells it, Cuban first learned about Flingo while strolling by its CES booth earlier this year. After catching a glimpse at the company’s social TV platform, Cuban quickly struck up a conversation with Flingo CEO Ashwin Navin and wiggled his way into the funding round. He’s leading the additional funding together with Gary Lauder, managing director of Lauder Partners. In February, Flingo announced that it raised $7 million from August Capital.

“I’m excited to be part of the Flingo experience,” Cuban — owner of the arthouse cinema chain Landmark and Magnolia Pictures, and chairman of HDNet — said in a statement today. “I truly believe the future of TV is social TV and Flingo will be one of the companies out front.”

Flingo has developed a technology, dubbed SyncApps, that can detect what you’re watching in just a few seconds and communicate that information to your television, smartphone, or computer. Think of it like a location-based service for what you’re watching. SyncApps eliminates the need to track down hashtags or other content related to what you’re viewing, allowing you to seamlessly interact with content while you’re watching it.

The company says it will use the funding to expand its presence among smart TV and device makers. It already has partnerships with Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Western Digital. Navin calls Cuban’s support a “tremendous validation” of the company.

Flingo was founded in 2008 by former early Bittorrent employees Ashwin Navin, Alvir Navin, and David Harrison. The company currently has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities.

Photo via Steven Rosenbaum/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The social TV startup Peel has added yet another feature to its multifaceted iOS app: the ability to “boo” and “cheer” American Idol contestants in real-time.

The American Idol integration — which isn’t an official partnership with Fox — serves as the pilot launch for Peel’s real-time TV engagement platform. So now not only can you use Peel’s app to discover things to watch and remotely control your TV (using the company’s hardware accessory), it’ll also be the place where you can commiserate with your friends over your favorite show as it’s airing.

“It looks like the definition of social TV today is checking into a show and tweeting about it, and we think that’s an interesting starting point, but it’s far from the finish line,” Scott Ellis, Peel’s vice president of marketing, told VentureBeat in an interview. With real-time engagement, Peel is looking to push the concept of social TV even further.

Here’s how it works: While you’re watching American Idol, you can jump into the real-time feed in the free Peel iOS app. You can tap boo and cheer buttons for singers as they appear on the show, which is synchronized by someone in the Peel offices viewing the East Coast Idol stream. Every week Peel will issue a report showing how the community responded to each performance — data that both Fox and fans could find interesting.

Ellis tells me that the company didn’t form an official partnership with Fox because such negotiations would have taken too long. And since Peel isn’t using any of Fox’s content, they didn’t need the network’s permission anyway. Once the company has some useful information from its engagement usage, it’ll bring that data to Fox for further discussion.

I played around with an early version of the real-time integration (obviously, without a live American Idol showing), and it performed smoothly. But the real test for Peel will be to get its users on-board, and to market itself to fans of American Idol who haven’t yet heard of its app.

After American Idol, Peel will look to integrating live engagement with other reality shows like Dancing with the Stars, as well as for special-interest sports events like the Olympics. The company is also working on bringing the live engagement platform to its Android apps within the next few months.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Peel landed $16.7 million in a second round of funding last year.

We’re not just using Twitter as a easy excuse to pontificate about current events. As Reuters points out, big growth in social media engagement is one of the key metrics the show’s producers will trot out when they’re selling advertisements for next year’s broadcast.

So if talk on Twitter translates to cold hard dollars, how does the Academy stack up? Social TV outfit Bluefin Labs counted 3.4 million #oscar related tweets, up three fold from the 966,000 they counted in 2011. Meryll Streep’s big win and J. Lo’s plunging neckline were the hot topics to chat about.

But while all that sounds good, it pales a little when you compare it to the Grammys, which managed to pull in 13 million tweets and an astounding 2,300 percent growth year over year. The Superbowl clocked in at around 12 million tweets, with more than 500 percent growth.

Breaking down these numbers is the bread and butter for firms like Bluefin, Trendrr, Getglue and Social Guide. How well this fledgling field works is still up for debate. But Twitter analysis did a pretty great job predicting the winners, nailing best picture, actress, and coming within a margin of error for best actor.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

One of the largest TV app publishers you’ve never heard of, Flingo, announced today that it has raised an additional $7 million from August Capital, which will help the company bring its Social TV technology to more devices and television networks.

Flingo has developed a technology, dubbed SyncApps, that can detect what you’re watching in just a few seconds and communicate that information to your television, smartphone, or computer. Think of it like a location-based service for what you’re watching. SyncApps eliminates the need to track down hashtags or other content related to what you’re viewing, allowing you to seamlessly interact with content while you’re watching it.

For example, Flingo recently launched a service that lets you share what you’re watching on TV with Twitter or Facebook with a single click. While TV check-in apps like Miso are popular among techies, Flingo offers a way for mainstream users to share their viewing habits with friends without much effort. Flingo’s technology could also serve to improve apps like Miso by making it easier to find the content you’re watching.

Flingo already has partnerships with A&E and the History Channel to use its social TV framework , but the company expects to use its new funding to reach every network in North America. The company’s technology is already available on over 7.8 million screens in 118 countries worldwide.

Flingo was founded in 2008 by former early Bittorrent employees Ashwin Navin, Alvir Navin, and David Harrison. The company currently has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities.

TV image via Shutterstock

We asked him why he thought a partnership with the relatively unknown startup was a good idea.

“People will ask me to do things once in a while,” he said. “This just seemed cool. Anything that’s outside the norm is kind of up my alley.”

Even over the phone, Shore was the picture of nonchalance about Youtoo, which lets users upload their videos to the site in the hopes of being seen on millions of living room screens as a “Peoplemercial.”

But pretty soon, it becomes that this — the pursuit of fame via the web — is a hot topic that gets Shore pretty passionate.

“The concept they came up with, that’s how people are becoming known now,” he told us. “At the end of the day, it’s about eyeballs, and all the eyeballs have shifted online.”

Shore realized a few years ago that the web was going to be an interesting new playground for comics. His first experience with engineered virality came in 2006 with a spoofed clip seen around the world.

“I did a video a while ago where I got punched in the face onstage,” he said. But it’s all fake, and there’s a making-of video. But the video where I got punched went viral, people were even talking about it on the news.”

“If it’s good, it’ll have legs,” said Shore. “If people spend some time on it, they can actually go somewhere.”

Later, the star started doing more polished online work for comedy site Funny or Die. But even though he was working with professionals and a script, he told us the process was a lot faster and a lot simpler than anything else he’d seen happen in Hollywood.

“That’s the cool thing about the [online video] industry — anyone can shoot anything, edit anything. There’s not a lot of pressure in the process. When I was shooting it, it was like, ‘Hey, it’s for the Internet.’”

And Shore continued to say that online video isn’t just a promotional vehicle for the famous or an American’s Funniest Home Videos-style blooper reel; rather, truly talented folks are gaining an entirely new level of access to Hollywood’s elite.

Referencing the cable-cutting phenomenon, he continued, “A lot of my younger friends are just starting out on their own, and they don’t have TV and cable; they just watch stuff on their computers.”

As a result, he explained, the studios are following the eyeballs to the Internet, and the intake side of the entertainment industry has shifted from audition tapes to viral YouTube clips.

“I have the email address for the head of Comedy Central. I can send him a clip right now. Back in the old days, you could never get to this person.”

“It’s an exciting opportunity to bring the ability to engage a widespread audience leading up to the presidential [elections],” IntoNow co-founder and Yahoo product manager Adam Cahan told VentureBeat. “This is the first multi-screen debate experience spanning TV, web and mobile devices with the ability to inform, interact and engage audiences.”

IntoNow, a social TV application for iPhone, Android and now iPad, was acquired by Yahoo in April 2011. The application uses patented technology to listen to and “tag” — a.k.a. identity — millions of television and movie titles.

Debate viewers who use the app to tag the ABC News broadcast will be presented with poll questions, related news content, candidate profiles and discussion streams all tailored around the event. ABC News will use the application’s poll feature to query live audiences and gauge reactions to candidates’ debate responses, and then use the collected data to pose follow-up questions.

So you may hear an ABC News moderator say something like, “Candidate X, our live data suggests only 33 percent of Americans agree with your stance on X…,” we’re told.

The news network has been aggressively promoting IntoNow on the air (Yahoo is a sponsor of the event), includeding a prominent mention on flagship show Good Morning America. It will continue to promote the app and its poll questions during the live broadcast.

The Republican debate airs Saturday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC and will be streamed online.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It looks like Yahoo is the latest competitor in the social TV market, with today’s announcement that it has acquired startup IntoNow.

I was pretty impressed with IntoNow when it launched in January. On top of the basic ability to “check in” to a TV show, IntoNow’s mobile app added cool features like Netflix integration and the ability to see what’s on now that your friends have watched in the past. Most significantly, its technology offered the Shazam-like ability to automatically recognize a show by listening to a few seconds of sound.

IntoNow spun out of another startup called Auditude. Yahoo isn’t disclosing the price of the deal, but TechCrunch writes that it was between $20 million and $30 million, while AllThingsDigital says it was $15 million in cash, $2 million in stock, and $5 million more in potential earnouts.

As a standalone product, IntoNow has potential, but it’s competing with a flood of other apps like Miso (which is backed by Google Ventures), GetGlue, and Comcast’s Tunerfish. Perhaps its real promise for Yahoo is as a social layer on Yahoo’s existing film and TV websites, enticing users to engage more with Yahoo content and therefore bring in more money for Yahoo ads. In a press release, Yahoo says IntoNow “will enable Yahoo! to provide enhanced media experiences and video programming, bolstering its social engagement across the Yahoo! network and on all screens.”

The acquisition, of course, comes at a time when Yahoo claims to be turning itself around, while also announcing substantial layoffs and the elimination of popular products like Delicious. The company claimed those cuts will help it focus on key priorities. We’ll see if IntoNow remains on that list of priorities.

I can’t go more than a week or two without getting an email about a new TV check-in startup, but it seems like there’s an audience here. For example GetGlue, which runs its own content check-in service and also allows other companies to use its technology through an application programming interface, just announced that it has 1 million users.

Loyalize goes beyond TV, and beyond check-ins. I talked to chief executive Todd Greene today at the Ad:tech conference, where he launched the company, and he said he’s not that excited about social TV, per se — it’s the real-time interactions that interests him. Yes, users can check-in to a TV show. Yet Greene said things get most interesting after the check-in. Loyalize apps can include a number of features, including news feeds, polls, a Smack Talk option that lets sports fans debate about their favorite teams. The apps can also include virtual currency which that users redeem for prizes.

The San Francisco startup spun out of social recommendation network Trusted Opinion, and it has already signed up one big customer — it built components of the SocialTV service embedded on Motorola’s smartphones and tablets. When I asked Greene about the “white label” approach of selling his product to companies rather than consumers, he said this makes sense because it’s is a natural way for brands to engage with the audiences that they’ve already built.

At the same time, he acknowledged that there are risks, because Loyalize doesn’t have complete control over companies customize and market the app. So Loyalize is “not precluding” the possibility of launching a consumer app in the future.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Social TV startup Philo tells me user numbers are “through the roof” right now, thanks in large part to copying a strategy from traditional TV — bring in the stars.

What kind of stars? Well, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, for one. Philo hosted one of its “virtual viewing parties” for the NBA’s Sprite Slam Dunk Contest this weekend, where O’Neal posted play-by-play comments on the contest while viewers could check-in and interact on the Philo website, its smartphone apps, or a Philo widget hosted on the NBA.com website.

When Philo told me about the promotion, I noted that the company had announced a number of similar partnerships over the last few months — including official viewing parties for Spike’s Video Game Awards, AMC’s The Walking Dead, and BBC America’s Doctor Who. So I wondered: Do these promotions actually pay off in increased user numbers?

Here’s what a company spokesperson told me:

User numbers are through the roof right [now] on Philo, and each of our partners is benefiting from an engaged and socially active audience. We completed a recent partnerships with AMC around THE WALKING DEAD, where a cast member chatted live on Philo with fans during an episode. This generated millions [of] real-time Facebook profile updates for the network, and we’re seeing similar numbers across the board.

All of our promotions with networks and online destinations have been huge successes, with each of our viewing parties producing millions of real-time Facebook profile updates during one episode of a show.

The most successful promotions, like The Walking Dead one, involve interactions with a star from the show, as well as some kind of real-world prize, the spokesperson told me.

Philo isn’t the only social TV company to experiment with these kinds of promotions. Miso, for example, has announced a number of show partnerships, including one with the Oprah Winfrey Network. (Disclosure: Miso investor Georges Harik is also an investor in VentureBeat.) But Philo is the only one I’ve heard of that’s incorporated this kind of behind-the-scenes chat with stars.

Of course, you can already find many of those stars on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which are an increasingly important way for TV shows to interact with their fans. (In fact, one of the main ways Philo said it would promote the chat was by having O’Neal tweet about it.) Apps like Philo don’t have the same reach, but they do allow stars and networks to reach the specific audience that’s watching a show at the moment it’s being aired.

New York-based Philo has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from North Bridge Venture Partners, DFJ Gotham Ventures, Eniac Ventures, and TV producer Stephen Lambert.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

There’s been a real explosion in TV check-in startups in the last year or so, but today, a company called IntoNow is launching what may be the most impressive social TV app yet.

IntoNow spun out of online video ad company Auditude, and the most attention-grabbing part of the app involves technology that was developed at Auditude. Think of it as the TV equivalent of music app Shazam — you can turn on the app (which is available for Apple’s iOS devices) while you’re watching a TV show, then the app will recognize the audio and identify the show. That makes it easier to tell your friends about what you’re watching, since you don’t have to type anything in. It also means you can get very specific, sharing not just the show but also the episode.

On the backend, IntoNow seems to be pulling an even more impressive technical feat than Shazam. It’s not just pulling its results from a library of songs, but actually processing more than 120 channels of television in real-time. So when the IntoNow team demonstrated the app for me last week, we watched a news show that was being broadcast for the very first time, yet the app still recognized it.

And it doesn’t just recognize new content. Founder and chief executive Adam Cahan said that thanks to Auditude, IntoNow has a record of pretty much anything that was broadcast on TV in the last five years. And that includes plenty of reruns, since the Auditude app recognized one of Cahan’s favorite shows, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Cahan said IntoNow will also make this technology, which it calls the SoundPrint platform, available to device manufacturers and application developers.

And the app does more than make it easy to share what you’re watching. Cahan argued that badges and other rewards for TV check-ins aren’t what motivate people to share — instead, the real reward is having fun, meaningful interactions. So you can share the shows you’re watching in the app, or on Facebook or Twitter, and you can see who else is watching the show at the same time, hopefully prompting some conversation.

If you’re interested in a show that someone else has shared, IntoNow makes it easy for you to watch that show too by immediately adding it to your Netflix queue or buying it on iTunes (assuming that it’s available). And you can learn more about the show by looking up its Internet Movie Database listing within the app.

Another cool feature tells you what’s on now that your friends have watched. So if your friend said they were watching a specific episode a few weeks ago, the IntoNow app will remember that, and will tell you if the episode is being repeated right now. It’s a fun, serendipitous way to find recommendations for what you could be watching at this moment.

As for how IntoNow plans to make money, Cahan noted that there are lots of advertising opportunities, especially since IntoNow can recognize the sound of commercials. So you could turn the app on while watching a commercial that you find particularly interesting, and it could provide additional information or offers around that product.

IntoNow hasn’t raised any of its own funding since spinning out of Auditude. Competitors include Miso and GetGlue.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The team behind Tunerfish, the social TV application launched by cable TV giant Comcast earlier this year, just announced that it’s releasing an application for Android smartphones.

Like a number of other applications, Tunerfish takes the “check in” idea (popularized by location services like Foursquare) into the TV world. Users can tell their friends what they’re watching, see what’s trending among other users, and earn rewards. Tunerfish has already launched an iPhone application and a website. In today’s blog post the company says the biggest demand from users was a downloadable Android app — until now, Android users had to check-in through the website.

This idea has attracted a lot of interest from companies big and small, with Time Warner investing in GetGlue’s media check-in platform and Google Ventures backing social TV app Miso. I asked Tunerfish general manager John McCrea (who, like other members of the Tunerfish team, came to Comcast through the acquisition of contacts startup Plaxo) about how he sees the competitive landscape, and he responded:

It wasn’t too surprising that a lot of startups would enter this space, but just how many has been a surprise. We’re pretty excited about our prospects in the best-of-both-worlds scenario. We remain a small and independent team, making great product in a very agile way, but we’re also part of Comcast, which should allow us to do some really exciting things in 2011 and beyond.

You can go here to download Tunerfish’s Android app.

As a marketing effort for QVC’s program The New Black Friday, Miso users who check in to the QVC channel between 8pm on Thanksgiving and the end of the day Friday will get a link to a special product deal that’s only being offered to Miso users. The San Francisco startup says it wants to keep the exact deal a surprise, but it will involve a kitchen or food product.

This follows yesterday’s announcement of a deal with Universal Studios Home Entertainment. To promote the upcoming Despicable Me DVD, Universal will have “minions” (characters from the movie) appear on various TV shows, starting with the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Users who check in to those shows can win points (also called minions, which is, yes, kind of confusing) that can be redeemed for prizes at the MinionMadness.com site.

When Miso launched, bloggers (including me) called it “Foursquare for TV” because it mirrored many of the features of Foursquare and other location check-in services. By adding deals, Miso is again following the lead of its location-based brethren. And as with location services, Miso can presumably offer these deals as a way to both increase user engagement and earn money. Facebook just added deals to its Places service.

The company has raised seed funding from Google Ventures and various angel investors. (Investor Georges Harik also invested in VentureBeat.) It’s competing with a number of other products, including Comcast’s new Tunerfish service.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Comcast got into the social TV game in June with the launch of a new service called Tunerfish. Today, the company announced a bunch of upgrades that general manager John McCrea said should lead to more sign-ups and growth.

Tunerfish was developed by team members from Plaxo, which was acquired by Comcast in 2008 — McCrea was Plaxo’s vice president of marketing, and Tunerfish product director Nida Zada was Plaxo’s director of user experience. Through the Tunerfish website and the iPhone application, users can share what they’re watching on television, see what’s trending among their friends or the general userbase, and earn rewards.

When I asked about Tunerfish’s numbers, McCrea didn’t give a specific user count, noting that it’s still a new product, but he revealed that the number of “shares” increased 500 percent between July and October. And its users are loyal — 10 percent of them return to the website or iPhone app seven days out of seven.

One of the big changes revealed today is a new look. Tunerfish ditched the boring text-only logo and worked with the Liquid Agency marketing firm to design a cute fish mascot, which you can see in various guises above. And the website has been redesigned with what the company says is a cleaner look. That look is also reflected in an updated version of the Tunerfish iPhone app that just went live.

Lastly, McCrea said his team responded to the biggest request from users — it’s now possible to sign-up for Tunerfish using a traditional email address and password, rather than requiring users to log in via Facebook or Twitter.

“This really surprised us, but almost all of our low ratings in the app store were around that issue,” McCrea said.

Comcast isn’t the only company interested in this area. For example, a Google Ventures-funded application called Miso also allows users to “check in” to their favorite TV shows.