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Sampling the future of gadgetry

CES 2012 has come to end.

The show was all about Televisions, Tablets, Smartphones and Ultrabooks.

The New York Times has done a great job of making a witty but critical summary about the new products presented at the show !

Read the full article here

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Will Intel acquire Roku ?

According to rumors, Intel may be thinking about acquiring Roku, maker of the popular, low-cost, multimedia streaming device that competes aggressively with the Google TV, and Apple TV, and Boxee Box devices.

Read the full article

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12 predictions for Social TV in 2012

Lostremote.com has written a nice piece on the future of Social TV for 2012. See if you agree with their statements or not : Social TV in 2012

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Live Blogging from Social TV Summit

Well, it's my second Social TV Summit. This time in NY and we're a Gold Sponsor :-)

Let's see if the conversation about Social TV has changed ...

Kay Madati (Facebook) believes that watching TV will be influenced by what your friends are watching. He splits the social tv conversation into before,  during, after.

But most importantly they're showing off their new Facebook Platform for TV sharing. Time for a round table on "How are the Major Broadcaster, Satellite and Cable Networks using Twitter, Facebook and new Social TV applications"

Kevin Conroy (Univision) says that the Latin population is much more active on social media in relation to TV! Hardie Tankersley (Fox Broadasting) is looking for monetization possibilities. Nobobdy has really figured it out yet, he says. Now they're trying to integrate their sponsors in the social media conversations.

Jeremy Legg (Turner Broadcasting) is integration Social Media into it's core business. The important part is syncing all platforms, having Facebook knowing what your watching. But he also uses Facebook as a proxy to drive viewers from the Facebook page to their own website.

Marc DeBevoise (CBS Interactive) is using social media from driving traffic to their websites. On some days, 30% of traffic come from social media.

Christy Tanner (TV Guide) : their app has been downloaded 5,5 million times. 

The case study about X-Factor : Deep show integration is critical for a compelling experience ! The audience involvement is huge because it's live and synced. But for this kind of production, you need a separate unit for these aspects live at the show.

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TV App Duo Set To Put West Flanders Firmly On The Tech Start Up Map

West Flanders – bit soggy, plenty of WWI battlefields and breweries... it’s certainly not Silicon Valley or any place you’d associate with one of the hottest start ups the Internet TV world has seen to date.  

But this tiny area in Western Belgium has given birth to some pretty enterprising characters: politician Herman Van Rompuy, cartographer Mercato and...  Audrey Hepburn. But now we’re about to add TV App Store (TAS) founders Vincent Parisis and Serge Billouw to that list.  

With the launch of the Netherlands version of the Bold & Beautiful App for their ground breaking ScreenToo package for their patented TAPP platform, in mid September, the rest of Europe and the US are about to hear a lot more about TAS.

So, why make such a song and dance about ScreenToo?

 It’s a multiplatform, non-disruptive solution for broadcasters, brands and agencies to create and monetize ‘Second Screen’ interaction, engagement and Social TV elements, as well as: Video on Demand (VOD) templates, game mechanics, metadata and curation. Basically, it’s a one-stop-shop for media companies to engage consumers with any mobile, smart phone or data device.

 It offers, not only industry leading revenue shares of between 70-89 percent on monetized interactions, but the payment data is deeply integrated with the interactive metrics which allows for fully consolidated analytics of consumer behaviour.  The interactivity and billing engine works with: quizzes, polls, chatting, predictions, play-a-long, voting, social TV, tCommerce and more.

 For anyone who wants more engagement with their favourite celebrity or TV programme, the product is sure to become a must have. By launching with Bold & Beautiful, TAS is accessing a market of 60 million viewers. Even if Bold & Beautiful isn’t the hottest deal in the US and UK, in the rest of Europe, it’s H-U-G-E. Eventually every country is set to have its own customised app, the Netherlands is just the first of 35 countries. And that’s just the beginning.

The very beginning

Like all the best start-ups, TAS started in a garage (in West Flanders, of course) back in 1999 when hardly anyone could envisage the possibilities of an internet enabled TV. And it wasn’t called TAS, in fact, it had nothing to do with TV apps at all but, with his first company, Etri, Vincent Parsisis was to sow the seed of what was to come.

Like all the best start-up ideas, Vincent’s came in the most unlikely circumstances. While crossing the Belgian border into France, he received a text message. “Bienvenue” it said, “Welcome to France”. Not very extraordinary and rather irritating if you cross a lot of borders, but this particular message started Vincent thinking that, instead of the news that he was in French mobile territory, what he’d rather be hearing about was the football results. And so an idea was born.

Within a couple of years, Etri, was a Belgian market leader providing mobile SMS, video and marketing, football, Formula 1 and tennis results, news, entertainment, games, sweepstakes, horoscopes and more. Vincent was awarded the title Best Entrepreneur in West Flanders.

But Vincent and Serge weren’t satisfied with this considerable success. Two years ago, with their fingers on the pulse, Vincent and Serge decided that the SMS services market had reached its peak and it was time for a change in direction. For these descendents of Flemish traders and entrepreneurs, the logical direction was apps. But with so many mobile app developers competing for the same space, they decided to aim bigger and what personal media device could be bigger than a TV screen?  Social vision combined with technical prowess, meant that it didn’t take them long to design their groundbreaking patented platform TAPP - the idea being the ability to tap into the TV screen, from a handheld device.

The USP

So what makes TAS stand out from their main competitors like Get Glue, Miso and Tunerfish? Well, the fact is none of these services offer the level of interactivity together with synchronicity that ScreenToo has, the combination of these is what makes the product unique.

ScreenToo’s other USP is that it doesn’t try to disrupt the market and kill off the TV channels. Instead, TAS work withthe broadcasters, by doing this and collaborating with production companies and broadcasters like Bold & Beautiful and NBC, unlike their competitors, they are authorised to use their content, with the manifest advantages this allows.  

And there’s one more very important point, as Vincent explains:

“We don’t take the audience away by redirecting viewers to other sites. We keep them in the broadcaster’s environment. We provide a medium where you can share your opinions on our platform.  I can share my information on Facebook without even going to my Facebook page. For the broadcaster, this is vital.”

It’s something the duo has thought through precisely. Serge adds:

“Social media is a communication platform and not an interaction platform. Instead of using Twitter and Facebook to interact with your audience, you should use interactivity platforms and use Facebook and Twitter to communicate the path of interaction. They are communication tools and not interaction tools.”

The Mechanics

TAS’s partnership with global broadcast playout giant, Snell, (700 broadcasters globally) recently won them the Superior Technology Award at National Association of Broadcasting (NAB) convention in 2011 for ScreenToo.

By integrating their ScreenToo architecture and delivery/payment engine into Snell's broadcast automation, Morpheus, they can create - with the real-time data essential to maintaining synchronicity between primary broadcast and second screen devices – a metadata triggering system which pulls information native to the playout as well as allowing broadcasters and producers to add companion material triggered from a Content Management System (CMS).

  The platform, TAPP, is both robust and scalable. TAS runs on, not just one or two, but ALL Amazon clouds to guarantee the availability and speed needed for a first class service. 

This is also a platform which truly intersects across many areas

Cross handset (runs on all mobile and fixed devices)

Cross platform (Apple, Android...)

Cross medium (TV, radio, print, website…)

Cross billing (debit, credit, in app, 3rd party, wallets, tokens etc.)

Men of the Moment

  And so we reach the present. Vincent and Serge are in talks with some of the world’s largest broadcasters and VC’s in London, LA and NYC, on their out-of-box solution for the second screen, TV companion app market. As well as Bold & Beautiful and Snell, they also have deals with Europe’s biggest online advertising company Hi Media, Ericsson and more, under their belts. There are other deals about to be signed, involving high profile celebrities we can’t yet name. And, having already injected 1.5 million Euros of their own money, Vincent and Serge are adamant that they want the right kind of VC funding. The money would be used to set up offices in NYC and LA as well as for operational support and investment in R&D.

They’re already breaking even and the Belgian office is taking on a couple of new employees every week. They expect the take up for ScreenToo in the US to be quicker than in Europe, which is likely to take another year. But vitally, the product is infinitely scalable and they’re not intimidated by the size of the task.

According to Vincent,  

“We’ve done it before in a small market, Belgium, now we intend to do it globally by setting out BIG”

[managingmobilemedia]

Speaking at DRRB

I was invited by Lars to speak at the Videoboost conference of the DRRB in Copenhagen. I had the opportunity the talk about my vision on Social TV and were the missing link is : interactions ! Social TV nowadays is mostly about people talking amongst each other, using tablets, smartphones, laptops, while watching the same programs. What's missing in all of this are the interactions (votes, quizzes, polls, ...), the feedback towards the broadcaster or production company, ... This is something new in the Social TV space that we should start working on ! Otherwise the social media (Facebook, twitter, ...) will dominate this space and TV broadcasters will lose out.

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Speaking at MIPCOM

  On 4th of October I was a guest speaker at the "DISRUPTIVE MEDIA MEET TODAY’S GAME CHANGERS" session on the MIPCOM fair in Cannes.

Together with colleagues of the industry we talked about the latest technology driven products/services with the power to transform consumer behaviour and the potential to disrupt the TV business as we know it today.  I presented our tapp solution as the answer the to "second screen"-future that awaits all broadcasters. What if you could interact with your audience from anywhere using any device at any time?  “Lots of people talk about social TV, and the only two words they use are Facebook and Twitter… They are not about interactions, they are about conversations.”  Our platform aims to change this by bringing the classical interactive features (votes, quizzes, polls, ...) into the Social TV space. It's time for the broadcasters to take hold off their audience again and bring them back on their platform. During the last 50 years everything has evolved away from linear TV. The Remote control, VCR's, VOD, IPTV, ... they were all tools that made it possible for the viewer to create his own EPG and eventually "cut the cord". Social TV is bringing linear viewing back. If you want to be social and talk about shows ... you have to be watching them as you're doing it ... so linear is becoming more and more important ! But at the moment Social TV is all about using Facebook and twitter. It's about having conversations between the viewers and some conversation between the viewers and the broadcaster. Social TV should be more than that. It should also be about interactions. Interaction with your audience : organizing polls. quizzes, group chats, ... Broadcasters should interact with their audience. By interacting they can learn a lot about what the viewer want's, what's they're interested in, ... Broadcaster should start developing their own platforms or they will lose their viewers to third party platforms that they have no control over. PS : Getting live twitter feedback from the audience  during the presentation was kinda daunting though :-) Here's a link to the Live Blog from MIPCOM Here's some screenshots from the session : 

and some links to the session on the MIPCOM website : 

Session details at MIPCOM 2011

My profile at MIPCOM 2011

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 Video Interview at IBC 2011

On IBC this year, I met a very nice lady called Angel Gambino. She's well known in the TV sector as an entrepreneur and investor who has a wide range of experience working with with innovative businesses that are developing and initiating high quality digital entertainment and those that aim to create social good. She interviewed me concerning our Screen Too-platform. Apparently this was an official IBC interview ... so it's even on there website :-) Enjoy ... (I hope)

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Is there more to life than facebook and twitter ?

After being awake for 27 hours … traveling, waiting, time difference … I attended the Social TV Summit in the Bel Air Country Club in LA. Thinking that I would learn something new in how the US tackled Social TV, I was all ears in the morning.

In the afternoon though, my attention started fading away … 

All they could talk about was Twitter and Facebook. When someone asked them : “where’s the money ?”, one speaker said : “well that’s the easy part, that comes at the end, don’t worry” … but if it’s so easy, why wasn’t anybody there making any money ?

There is no doubt that twitter and facebook drive traffic … although it still hasn’t been proven that using social media increases viewers (see my previous post). But Social media are not the answer for interactivity. They’re tools for giving your audience the possibility of expressing themselves to the producers and fellow watchers. They’re not made for real interactions like voting, chat, polling, … And they also don’t bring in the money for the TV stations.

The same thing applies to check in tools like GetGlue, Tunerfish, … they show you who’s watching and where they are, but again they don’t provide interactivity possibilities.

The future is in products that make viewers interactive with the program their watching. That allow them to take part in the show !

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Does twitter drive TV ratings ?

It all depends who you ask :-) Of course says twitter … but research by TV Genius and TVGuide.com show a different picture. There is no direct correlation between the programs with the highest volume of twitter and the highest tv ratings. 

It’s more about the type of program. Programs that have a high social following create a high volume of twitter and thus will go up in the ratings, but that doesn’t mean that this a general finding that applies to all programs !