GigaOM » Social TV

NextGuide’s new website turns your friends’ Facebook likes into your TV guide

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:41 +0000

San Francisco-based Dijit launched the web version of it’s NextGuide app Monday, and after playing with it for a while, I have to say the company may be onto something here.

Dijit launched an iPad version of NextGuide last summer, aiming to reinvent the traditional TV guide with universal search for movies and TV content across live TV and iPad apps from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and others. Users of the app can also define searches for very specific interests and get recommendations for any content related to their hobby or their hometown.

It all makes sense – but I just don’t find myself frequenting the iPad app very much. Maybe it’s the fact that I just don’t feel like I don’t have enough choices for things to watch. Maybe it’s due to my binge viewing habits: while I’m burning through a new show (mind you, burning a very relative term if you have a job and a family), I don’t look for much else, and don’t need to know what’s on. Or maybe it’s just that the app is a bit too complicated for its own good.

But there’s something about NextGuide’s new web app sibling that is very intriguing. For one thing, it is a lot simpler than the iPad app, and it feels less like you have to turn thousand nobs before you get good results.

But the app also feels a lot more social, thanks to its Facebook integration: Users can easily browse the movies and TV shows any of their Facebook friends have liked on the social network, no matter whether these contacts are using NextGuide or not. The results are displayed in a Pinterest-like fashion, inviting you to aimlessly browse around and check out what your friends like to watch.

Once you find something that catches your interest, you’re able to see which services it is playing on, add it to your own Watchlist or subscribe to email alerts to be notified when new episodes are available online, or on the air. Essentially, it turns your friends’ Facebook likes into your TV guide, and that’s pretty cool. Oh, and you can also compile a list of your own favorites to display to the world.

Pre-populating a video discovery service with data from Facebook certainly isn’t new – but there’s something about this kind of Pinterest-like approach that just invites browsing. And TV fans will appreciate that their friends’ likes, which are otherwise scattered on Facebook, are all brought together in one place.

Sure, there’s still room to improve NextGuide on the web. Recommending the right resources to play content is one of those things. For example, for a show like the Daily Show, it only recommends Hulu, Amazon and iTunes, even though full episodes are also available on the show’s website.

But even with those shortcomings, I have to say that I enjoyed playing with the website, and I can see myself coming back to it much more often than to the app.

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Meet SnappyTV, the startup behind Twitter’s March Madness video strategy

Eliza Kern — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 23:41:55 +0000

When you log on to Twitter during March Madness starting this week, you probably won’t be thinking much beyond the state of your bracket. But if you happen to notice video replays showing up in your feed, they’ll be coming from the technology platform built by SnappyTV, the little startup at the heart of Twitter’s video advertising strategy during one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

We’ve heard a good deal over the past year or so about Twitter building up advertising opportunities as well as multimedia content, and now it’s all coming together during March Madness. SnappyTV will bridge the tech gap between Twitter and Turner Broadcasting to create new opportunities for advertising revenue around the second screen television experience, providing short highlight videos throughout the entire basketball tournament.

Twitter is clearly interested in making money from social TV, as it demonstrated with the Bluefin Labs acquisition, so this partnership is a window into what that concept could look like.

We covered the news about the partnership on Monday that was first reported by USA Today, but today I spoke further with SnappyTV CEO Mike Folgner about the technology involved in his platform and how it presents opportunities for both the basketball fans and Twitter. Folgner built one of the first in-browser video editors with Jumpcut in 2006 before the company was acquired by Yahoo, where Folgner went to become general manager for video.

The partnership this year will allow editors at Turner TO use SnappyTV’s video-editing platform to put together short, 15-second highlight videos throughout the tournament. Editors with Turner will use both human judgement and an algorithm from SnappyTV that tracks the most-discussed moments on social media to pick the best moments from the games, and less than a minute later, can send out an video with the highlight for people to view and (hopefully) retweet.

“Let’s say something happens, like there’s a great play, and 20 seconds later, there’s a tweet from the March Madness account with the play. And people can watch it almost instantly and retweet it,” Folgner said. “You just get this really cool second screen experience around Twitter and the game.”

This isn’t the first year that SnappyTV and Turner have partnered to provide March Madness clips — they actually provided the same function for last year’s tournament. But this is the first year that the videos will be able to take advantage of Twitter cards, which allow you to expand tweets without leaving the main Twitter stream to view content. (Last year the videos were just tweeted out as URLs.) And this is the first year that Twitter has found advertisers specifically for those video — AT&T and Coke Zero will be sponsoring them.

“The real difference with this year is now these advertisers who are buying these key TV shows, now they have the opportunity to buy the social conversation around the shows as well. And there really hasn’t been that connection before,” Folgner said. “People watch TV and talk about it on Twitter. So by sending the video out, you connect the brand advertisement on television with the branded content on Twitter.”

Users watching from the March Madness app (available mainly to existing cable customers) will be able to see the social conversation around the games, as well as the highlight videos they’ll be able to replay and tweet out. While the number of videos per game will vary, SnappyTV estimated that it would be about 10 clips per game on the high end. Which, at more than 60 games, is a fair number of video tweets. So you might want to follow the @marchmadness account at your own Twitter discretion.

It will be interesting to watch how the partnership plays out for this year’s tournament — and if it goes well, just how quickly SnappyTV gets acquired before the next one rolls around.

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Social fourth-quarter 2012 analysis

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:49:29 +0000

Interest may be weakening in consumer social media businesses. But social technologies are working their way deeper and deeper into enterprise computing, and social media is playing a bigger role across advertising and marketing sectors. In the fourth quarter social business software went both vertical and horizontal, Adobe and Behance built in community, and Facebook tested new revenue streams.

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Exclusive: Peel partners with Samsung to take its social TV guide app international

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:50:09 +0000

Peel is rolling out its social programming guide in 21 European and Asian countries this week, allowing users of select Samsung Android tablets to find TV shows they want and change the channel with the device’s integrated IR blaster. Samsung is preloading the Peel app onto its Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets, with plans to roll out TV guides in more than 50 countries by early 2013. The Mountain View-based startup hopes that the partnership with Samsung will lead to millions of additional users over the holiday season.

Peel’s programming guide has been available in North America ever since the company launched with its own IR blaster accessory last year. It also has been providing basic remote control capabilities to users of Samsung’s devices in a range of countries for some time, but the company’s VP of Marketing Scott Ellis told me this week that it took some effort to provide all of those users in countries like Malaysia, Portugal and Luxembourg with actual TV guides to tell them what’s on at any given time. “This requires relationships with a patchwork of metadata providers,” he said, adding that Peel is now providing guide data for 20,000 channels in Europe alone.

Peel’s new app with TV guide data will be available in 17 European countries, including heavyweights like Germany, the U.K. and France, as well as Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Initially, it will be limited to Android tablets from Samsung, but Ellis said that he wants to have the same functionality available on other Android devices as well as other platforms as well soon.

Peel is competing in a crowded space of social TV guides and companion apps, which includes newcomers like NextGuide as well as established players like the more check-in focused GetGlue, which recently got acquired by Viggle. However, Ellis told me that he doesn’t see that much overlap between apps like GetGlue and Peel, in part because of Peel’s strong focus on remote control capabilities. In the end, changing the channel matters more to users than checking into a show, he said. “The core proposition of social TV is secondary to the user,” he said, adding: “For us, control is a key part of the experience.”

Ellis didn’t want to tell me how many active users Peel currently has, only stating that it is north of three million, and that he expects to add millions more as people buy Samsung devices this holiday season. Publicly available data from Google Play suggests that there are between one and five million installs of the Galaxy Tab version of the Peel app alone. Peel is also available on iOS as well as through a standalone Android app. The company currently employs 25 people, and raised a $16.7M Series B from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and others in 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Horia Varlan.

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Why the iPad app NextGuide wants to be the Switzerland of TV guides

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:34 +0000

NextGuide, the TV recommendation app for the iPad developed by the guys over at Dijit, rolled out an update Wednesday that adds some social functionality and makes it easier to collect things for you to watch.

It’s a solid update worth checking out if you’re interested in an app that helps you to find shows and movies on live TV as well as streaming services like Amazon Instant and Netflix – but the thing that I took away from a conversation I had this week with Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman was something else. I asked Toeman why there’s even a need for an app like NextGuide, now that everyone from Google to Roku offers universal search across a multitude of services. His answer: Because we’re Switzerland.

NextGuide’s newest update includes a social stream that shows which content your contacts like – even if they’re not using the app.

Toeman argued that most companies involved in this space have too much of a vested interest to be good at becoming TV’s next recommendation engine. Subscription services like Netflix exclusively focus on their own offerings, and all but ignore anything on live TV. Cable companies on the other hand recommend both live TV and their own on-demand services like Xfinity.com – but they still don’t link to their competition. “I don’t see the Xfinity app searching Netflix for me,” Toeman quipped.

Device makers are in a bit of a different position, because they often want to present you with as many content choices as possible. But Roku exclusively focuses on viewing content that works on its own devices. That means you’re screwed if you want to watch anything on the TV in your den that doesn’t have a Roku, or even continue watching a movie on your iPad during your morning commute.

NextGuide on the other hand doesn’t care about any of that. The app supports content from 54 5 different content sources, including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu Plus. It currently puts a heavy focus on watching content on the iPad, but it can already be used in conjunction with a DirecTV DVR, and Toeman said that support for other devices and platforms is coming soon.

NextGuide extends this Switzerland-like approach to the way it handles social signals. The newest version of NextGuide integrates an activity stream that lets you see what your friends are doing on the service. But it doesn’t stop there: Users can also see what kind of shows their friends are liking on Facebook, even if those friends don’t use NextGuide themselves.

Missing from the app is the kind of restless conversation through pulled in Twitter or Facebook comment streams many others in the space are banking on. Toeman told me that he wants to use social networks to find recommendations for new content, not to relay what everyone is saying about shows and movies. “I don’t care what people tweet,” he told me.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user twicepix.

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The state of cross-platform media measurement

lydialoizides — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:30:17 +0000

Today brand advertisers must go to great lengths to find their audiences. Thus, brand advertising’s focus on cross-platform media measurement has grown dramatically in the past five years. But the ecosystem, which this report examines from a broad perspective, struggles to solve the correlation between the two media-viewing behemoths, TV and online. Within the next 36 months, the measurement of cross-platform digital video advertising will standardize, driven by the shift in media dollars from TV to online viewing, the adoption of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, and another political and Olympic cycle. In the meantime, new types of measurement of online behavior and ad performance will come to market.

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Connected consumer third-quarter 2012

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 06:55:33 +0000

The third quarter saw many parts of the traditional media business in flux. New digital platforms that once had confined themselves to user-generated content began to invest in creating professional-quality content. At the same time, TV programmers began to wrestle with both the threat and the opportunity presented by second-screen and social-TV platforms. The period also saw the rollout of new device-based content ecosystems, red flags and red ink for traditional consumer electronics makers, and a resurgence of consumer purchases of movies. This quarterly wrap-up discusses these developments as well as offers trends and topics to watch for the remainder of 2012 and beyond.

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Mobile 2012 and beyond

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:55:31 +0000

Few industries change at the pace mobile does. Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always new technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here, GigaOM Pro highlights a few segments of the mobile industry that will be important to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to wireless networks, and new business models for carriers.

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Renewed or canceled? This social TV app thinks it knows

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 23:07:29 +0000

New Jersey-based iOS app developer Andrew Fernandez just published the V2.0 of his social TV app Renewed, which takes on other apps in this space with an interesting twist. Renewed says it knows which shows are going to get canceled, and which ones will get picked up for another season, simply based on the data it gathers from check-ins.

The app displays a health meter for each and every show. These predictions may be based on a small user base for now, but Fernandez told me that he has bigger plans for this kind of data. “My big goal for the data is to make it available to networks and studios as another measuring tool similar to Nielsen Ratings,” he told me via email, adding: “Some companies are correlating the social data with spikes in ratings, I would like to actually create real-time accurate ratings.’

Competing with Nielsen solely based on check-in data may sound like a very ambitious proposition, but Renewed’s approach definitely shows us that new technology is going to offer new ways to measure viewership and engagement. Fernandez said that he plans to integrate automatic content recognition technology to automate check-ins and also prevent people from cheating the system.

In the near future, Fernandez also wants to add more content sources to Renewed. Version 2.0 of the app already allows users to automatically jump to a specific episode of the show within the Netflix, HBO Go and iTunes apps. Renewed also makes it possible to comment on an episode via Facebook or Twitter, and check in via Miso and GetGlue.

Check out a few screenshots of the app below:

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Social-TV apps and consumer behavior

Nicole — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 06:55:18 +0000

A new category of digital media has emerged in the living room: social TV. This relatively new concept can be defined as any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Currently social TV occurs in three ways: organically, as pure play or through TV- or set-top-enabled communication. This report will focus on the pure-play aspect of social TV as it relates to content providers, television networks and advertisers. It answers key questions relating to the segment’s growth potential, important companies, their competitors and likely business models for the future.

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