GigaOM » Christy Tanner

TVGuide.com’s new iOS app: social TV for the mainstream

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:00:47 +0000

Christy Tanner is a little bit like the Marissa Mayer of social TV. Tanner, who is the EVP and GM of TVGuide.com and TV Guide Mobile, has a huge audience – but most of those users aren’t exactly Foursquare- and Instagram-using Silicon Valley insiders. They don’t come to TVGuide.com to collect check-ins or badges, but to watch TV. A lot of it. And from a company like hers, they first and foremost expect what its name promises: a TV guide.

But TV is changing, and so is the way people are consuming it, regardless of whether they’re San Francisco hipsters or families in rural Texas. Netflix now has 24 million subscribers in the U.S., and more and more families are using multiple devices to access TV shows, with the iPad quickly becoming everyone’s favorite on-demand screen.

TVGuide.com’s Christy Tanner: The Marissa Mayer of social TV?

And with that, Tanner has a problem that’s a bit like the one Mayer is facing at Yahoo now: How do you evolve while the world changes around you without scaring away your huge legacy user base? Tanner has been doing this by keeping the traditional grid that most people associate with a brand like TV Guide alive, even though many TV startup founders tend to mock it. Instead of throwing it out altogether, she is augmenting it with the Watchlist, a personalized guide that first launched on TVGuide.com a year ago and has since been used by 500,000 people.

This week, the Watchlist is coming to the TV Guide iOS app, which now also features in-app links to content on iTunes, HBO Go and Hulu Plus. The Watchlist also allows users to check into shows and keep track of the episodes they’ve already seen, and there are some basic social sharing and commenting features – but don’t expect too many bells and whistles. Instead of social activity streams, the app emphasizes TV and celebrity gossip.

“News is our social feature,” said Tanner when she stopped by our office to demonstrate the app earlier this week. In other words: The app gives people something to talk about instead of making the conversation itself the centerpiece.

That doesn’t mean that Tanner’s team ignores what other social TV startups are up to. A third of TVGuide.com’s 66-strong team are engineers, and Tanner recently aqui-hired the developers of the social TV guide Fav.tv. “We are really hands-on in the way we build our things,” she explained.

That also means that the team is constantly evaluating new developments in areas like synched second-screen experiences and remote control functionality. But unlike others, Tanner doesn’t want to roll out experiments with select partners, which would limit functionality to just one type of DVR or one set-top-box from one satellite provider. “We need to be comprehensive,” she told me, adding: “It’s a lot harder to execute at scale.”

Still, Tanner wants to eventually add more social and second-screen functionality to her mobile apps, and considers the newly rolled out iOS app a first step. “We are definitely going to integrate automatic content recognition functionality within the next six to nine months,” she told me. One of the first areas could be synchronized ads. Said Tanner: “That’s going to come very soon.”

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TVGuide.com buys online programming guide Fav.tv

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:30:51 +0000

San Francisco-based Fav.tv, the site that wanted to be a kind of TV Guide 2.0, has been bought by none other than TVGuide.com itself. TVGuide.com’s GM Christy Tanner declined to give any financial details about the transaction during a recent phone conversation, but she described it to me as an acqui-hire, with the goal of strengthening her service’s mobile strategy. Two of the Fav.tv folks will join TVGuide.com full time, while a third employee of the startup will become a temporary consultant.

We first reported about Fav.tv last July, and the site officially launched in September. In a way it has been a very traditional TV programming guide, focusing first and foremost on major broadcast and cable network. The site allows users to follow their favorite shows and get notifications when new episodes air, and has impressed with its clean design and simplicity. Tanner said Friday that Fav.tv will go offline in a few weeks, and existing users will be encouraged to join TVGuide.com’s own personalized programming guide, known as the Watchlist.

TVGuide.com launched its Watchlist feature last August, and Tanner told me that 450,000 people have created their own personal lineup so far. She said that the Fav.tv team will help to make the Watchlist a central part of TVGuide.com’s mobile experience, both through apps and on the web.

“TVGuide.com’s mobile business has been growing really rapidly,” Tanner said, explaining that the company sees some 1.5 million active users per month for its mobile app and web offerings.

What to make of a major publisher like TVGuide.com doubling down on mobile video curation? Even if the business has faced its own troubles (it has changed hands numerous times over the past 10 years, the parent company ~~was sold for $1 in 2008~~ ~~and~~ is now owned by movie and TV company Lionsgate), it’s something that should worry many of the smaller startups. Tanner definitely wasn’t shy about the power a brand like TVGuide.com has in the market. One example: Foursquare-style check-ins for TV shows.

Startups like Miso and Getglue may have been getting a lot of coverage for their check-in functionality in 2011, but TVGuide.com succeeded in selling it to more than 80 advertisers, making it one of the few companies that has actually made money with social TV.

“It’s been profitable and contributed millions of dollars in 2011,” Tanner said.

Correction: TV Guide the magazine sold for $1; the website and the other TV Guide properties actually sold for $255 million in 2009.

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@ pcE11: Measuring The Twitter Effect On TV Viewing And Programming Choices

Tom Krazit — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:01:01 +0000

It’s a wild world these days at the intersection of traditional television business models and all the new ways that people are consuming content online and across different devices. Panelists at paidContent Entertainment 2011 grappled with the implications of that shift by emphasizing the need for quality: quality metrics, quality marketing strategies, and, of course, quality shows.

Technologies like Twitter have changed the way that the television business thinks about live event programming, said Morgan Wandell, executive producer for ABC (NYSE: DIS) Studios. “There’s a social phenomenon around television driving viewers to want to watch the shows live so they don’t miss things or have spoiler implications if they waited two days to watch the show.” He cited the X-Factor (U.S.) as an example: the show allowed viewers to vote for their favorite performer via Twitter direct message, and they saw 3,000 tweets a minute.

But this really only works for a few big shows, said Christy Tanner, general manager and executive vice president for TV Guide Digital: most people aren’t going to be disappointed if the next episode of Ice Road Truckers is spoiled by those watching it live. “What that means is we have a very challenging environment to create mass events that scale, particularly live mass events at scale,” she said.

Those types of events don’t come along very often and are tricky to pull off in the U.S., spread out across three time zones. But the unique nature of these events, often consumed with a mobile device in hand, allow advertisers to reach a bigger audience because they create complementary opportunities for advertising, said Steven Treinen, vice president of advertising sales and marketing solutions for Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Digital Entertainment.

And they also present both a challenge and opportunity for those who can provide the most massive metrics as to how people are engaging with content on other devices and through media like Twitter, said Gregory Markel, founder and president of Infuse Creative.

“There is a massive amount of fraud in third-party advertising options for content owners,” Markel said. Companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), who has done a pretty good job eliminating fraud from their search advertising business, have a chance to capture more business in this space if they can draw viewers to things like Google TV and the newly launched YouTube Channels.

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