New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On Tuesday night, GetGlue held a rooftop party at The Standard in Manhattan’s East Village to get everyone excited about the new launch. Executives from USA Network, A&E, Nickelodeon, BET, Showtime and more watched as Iskold told the room that they have the answer to how you’re going to discover TV in a social world.

“The new GetGlue guide is not a grid; it is a personalized calendar for what to watch,” states their launch announcement. On postcards and in his presentation, Iskold kept referring to the fact that the TV grid hasn’t changed at all since that 50s — and that it’s time. They’re now going to be implementing Tribune Media Services (TMS) data into the app, so when you search for a show it will also tell you what channel it’s on. Also, when you go to a show’s page there will be more content then ever about the show (videos, promos, news and more).

GetGlue HD is available immediately on the iPad and will come out on the iPhone, Android, mobile site, and GetGlue.com later in the fall.

Buzz is still heating up for Zeebox’s long-awaited U.S. launch. Zeebox has proven traction in the UK, while GetGlue has partnerships with 75 networks. Both companies are striving for the same goal, but taking different approaches.

Stay tuned for an exciting fall TV season, where partnerships, user acquisition and retention, and the “cool” factor will be at the forefront of the second screen experience.

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“We’d love people to take the data and we’d love to see what they make of it,” Zeebox’s director of insight David Boyle told The Guardian. “I’d love to know what patterns people find.”

The survey examines usage patterns and drills down on how people are interacting with TV. For example, looking at the US data, 40% of the respondents say they’re frequently on social media while watching TV (but only 9% on Twitter), 30% say they often use the internet to get more information, but only 7% say they often use an app “from the TV show I’m watching” (compared to 13% who say they frequently visit a TV show’s website while watching.)

The results line up with previous surveys we’ve published here on Lost Remote, and perhaps that’s why Zeebox has released the numbers without fear of giving up any trade secrets. But there’s lots of fun slicing-and-dicing you can do with the Google Doc that Zeebox released, comparing users’ demographics and responses against different data points.

If you see anything worth pointing out, please leave a comment.

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It’s a competitive space, but nobody’s cracked the code

The Guardian, which has championed Zeebox, is already describing Sidecastr as a potential rival to the UK-based social TV app. In the past year, many apps have attempted to be a one-stop shop for your second-screen social TV needs, but most are struggling for scale. Sidecastr has already been through the failure part and now has rebounded and positioned itself well to keep the market growing. “We started life way back in 2009 by being one of the very first social TV companies pursuing white-label app platform model with the networks, but decided early on to change course and emerge as an independent, fan-centric ‘community of communities’ app,” Brand described.

How is Sidecastr different than other second screen apps?

Here are a few different attributes that Brand described differentiate Sidecastr.

-”We obliterate the requirement of having to watch live TV in order to experience and participate in the real-time social TV comment stream.” These Tomorrowish-type features are definitely a requirement for the population of time-shifters that continue to grow.

-”We aim to be the ‘community of communities’, the social network for Social TV” and “show by show, we are building a content store of 100% fan curated social comments that lives forever.” While a community of communities is definitely the right route to go down, it seems like reddit and GetGlue have a pretty good ownership over that space – maybe one of them will offer a more robust API in the future.

-”We especially want to be viewed by the Twitter community as the ideal Twitter integrated 2nd screen app ‘purpose-built’ for watching TV.” Again, it seems GetGlue is doing this very well and that at the end of the day, Twitter is probably the ideal Twitter second screen app. On the other hand, Sidecastr does “integrate fully with Twitter’s tweet, retweet, reply model, both inbound and outbound,” according to Brand, something I haven’t seen on many other social TV apps.

“We own or control all of our own technology – including our own patent pending ACR (audio fingerprint based) system.” This part is especially great to hear since so many times a great user interface on an app is hurt by the fact that it can’t usually figure out what show a user is watching, hopefully this tech will be different.

Does Sidecastr have a chance?

Definitely. We’re still in day one and there’s no app that’s come close in the TV world to hit the mainstream exposure that Twitter and Facebook have. Sidecastr’s been around for three years and has pivoted after recognizing what wasn’t working. Their company is currently six people, four developers (split on working on the server/app) and are just beginning to go after Series A funding. The coming year is going to see second screen apps mature and learn from the past year’s mistakes.

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Zeebox said Network Ten — the equivalent of one of the US’ major broadcast channels — is making a “substantial investment” in the Australia joint venture as well as committing to promotional support. While Network Ten is the “anchor partner,” Zeebox says it is “working across the major media companies and content owners in Australia to enable them to use Zeebox in similar fashion to reach their fans and to extend their ability to commercialize TV viewers to the second screen.” Those partners will be able to use the Zeebox OpenBox toolkit which allows broadcasters to publish show-specific content into the app.

After Zeebox won a few important awards at TV of Tomorrow, the company leaked more details about their imminent US launch at the end of the summer. According to TechCrunch, “Zeebox expects to come across the pond by the end of summer, “with more than 150 channels based on audio fingerprinting, and be able to tell exactly what you’re watching.” This statement in their release confirms that even further.

We’ve been covering Zeebox since they began to gain traction in the UK. Their app (which you can access on the web here) includes opportunities to connect with friends, integrate with advertisers using Z tags and incorporate talent appearances. Networks are going to be extremely excited about this one-stop shop for social TV as many of the other second screen options have only fine-tuned parts of them. In the social TV world, it feels a bit like the Beatles are coming to perform in the U.S. for the first time – will everyone like them?

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“This activity fits perfectly with our strategy in terms of amplifying the anticipation and conversation that has already started,” explains Eray Galip, creative solutions manager with 20th Century Fox.

The movie’s campaign also has a unique tie-in with the second-screen app Zeebox. Viewers who tweet about Sunday’s movie trailer from within the Zeebox app — adding the #Zeebox hashtag — could win tickets to the movie and an exclusive pre-premiere screening. As the campaign continues throughout May, the Zeebox app will recognize when a Prometheus spot is airing and offer Zeebox users more chances to win prizes.

Zeebox is calling it the first-ever synchronised second-screen ad campaign in the UK. “This represents the first use of Zeebox as a platform for advertisers, and showcases zeebox’s real-time ad recognition technology that enables a promotion to run on the second-screen in synch with a TV commercial,” said Simon Miller, head of product at Zeebox. Added Caroline Clancy with media agency Vizeum, “By synchronizing our TV spots with zeebox we are moving the campaign beyond the bounds of TV ad lengths and extending users’ experience to allow for further exploration of the campaign.”

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What’s fascinating about this deal is the exclusivity provision, which is unusual for social TV efforts desperate for scale. But the UK second screen startup Zeebox adds a unique dimension here. Shazam says over 10 million people in the UK have downloaded the Shazam app, while last month Zeebox reported 250,000 downloads and growing fast — at one point, 15,000 new downloads an hour. As we reported earlier this year, Zeebox partnered with Sky TV, which has since been running on-air promos for the Zeebox app. And Zeebox has a click-to-buy feature tied on on-screen commercials.

Enter “Shazam for TV,” which has gained traction in the US, but had yet to break into the UK market. ITV is the largest commercial broadcaster in the UK — over several channels — and it’s “also established one of the leading sales organizations in the world,” points out Shazam’s Andrew Fisher. The exclusivity may motivate ITV’s sales team to pitch Shazam more aggressively. Explains Simon Daglish, Sales Director at ITV, “This exciting and exclusive partnership means that ITV is able to offer customers a real first for UK media and allow brands to innovate their spot campaigns and connect directly with audiences on a large scale.”

In the US, Shazam has been working with broadcasters of all shapes and sizes, especially around big events like the Super Bowl and the Grammys. Zeebox, meanwhile, is planning its US debut sometime this quarter.

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“We’re delighted to have Jason join the Zeebox team,” said Ernesto Schmitt, CEO of Zeebox. “He brings significant domain expertise and a broad set of relationships in the US broadcasting and media industries. As EVP USA, Jason will apply his operational experience and strategic insight to supporting our launch in the US market.”

Zeebox says it’s working on the final touches with its launch partnerships “with key industry players,” and it’s planning on launching the second-screen app in the US in the second quarter of this year. Zeebox has been growing fast in the UK, enjoying a surge of downloads thanks to its new relationship with SkyTV.

Of course, the US market is much more competitive than the UK for second screen apps, with over a dozen players and counting — not to mention the MSOs efforts, to boot. But there’s still a chance that Zeebox could gain a foothold despite the comptition. Just look at recent data from Viggle, which launched in January 26th in the US: the company say it’s already reached 250,000 registered users and surpassed 7 million check-ins. For Zeebox, a SkyTV-like partnership in the US could give it a big boost — stay tuned.

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Wow. What a weekend. With first couple of days of our TV advertising on air, we’re getting up to 15,000 new sign-ups per hour. #zeebox

— ernesto schmitt (@ErnestoSchmitt) March 5, 2012

This goes to show how effective on-air promotion can be for driving downloads of second-screen apps. And by extension, how important strategic relationships with TV networks, cable channels, MSOs and local TV stations can be. Here’s the ad that aired on Sky TV, via The Next Web:

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How the new clickable ads work:

“Within seconds of a TV ad appearing on screen, a corresponding click-to-buy button appears – as if by magic – in Zeebox’s real-time tag stream,” their release explains. “Each tag is marked with an icon that denotes whether the advertised product is a song, product, travel service, etc.” We spoke with Zeebox cofounder and CTO Anthony Rose who explained the new clickable ads further. “We use advanced video fingerprinting to recognise ads as they appear on TV,” he explained. “Within a few seconds of an ad starting on TV, we can serve a click-to-buy or a display ad in zeebox, in sync with the ad on TV.”

Are there partnerships set in place yet with advertisers?

There are no partnerships with advertisers in place yet as Zeebox is just at the beginning stages of rolling this out. “We don’t need to partner with anyone, we simply select ourselves what ads are useful to augment, and where to send the traffic to,” Rose described. “We got started with around 1000 ads, which is about 20% of the ads on TV in a given week, with us covering about a half of the top commercial channels.” They’ll be increasing the percentage of ads they add “zeetags” too over the coming weeks.

How the click through they’ve designed is already benefiting the ads they’ve tagged:

While there’s no doubt that we’ll soon be seeing UK brands testing out Zeebox’s clickable ads, Rose explained how they’re already providing click through for the ads they’ve tagged. “For now we’re using click-to-buy zeetags, with our systems and operators selecting the destination – for example, we send music purchases to iTunes, DVDs to Amazon, food to Tesco, cosmetics to Boots.”

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As Paid Content points out, “The funding means Zeebox has a triple-digit million valuation after just two months of live operation, and without yet having executed a monetization strategy.” Zeebox claims to have attracted 250,000 users so far — a user base that Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi also stated when the company recently launched SideShows in New York. Hopefully, this new round of money will help expedite the company’s launch in the US where the market is a lot more mature, in the sense that there are tens of different second screen social options for TV.

Zeebox CTO and Co-Founder Anthony Rose confirmed with us that, “it will accelerate our international rollout,” but alse added that he “can’t say anything beyond that.” We also asked him what he’ll be using the new cash for and he said, “development, new features, more platforms, international rollout.”

Finally, we wanted to know if there would be any more announcements this week with CES upon us. He confirmed that, “no additional announcements planned, other than announcing Facebook OpenGraph integration, which has just gone live.” This is also an important move for nascent Twitter user, Rupert Murdoch (News Corp’s infamous Chairman) whose last major social purchase, MySpace, didn’t end too well. Hopefully, Murdoch will start Zeeboxing himself and leverage his newly found social media influence to spread the word. He’s yet to tweet the news.

One interesting critique we noticed in the comments of our piece on Zeebox was from PBS’s Associate Creative Director, David Wilder. “Nicely done. Except when Xfinity creates this same app with its millions of already connected subscribers, it’ll drive this company into extinction.” Will this new relationship result in BSkyB programming defaulting to Zeebox for second-screen needs? Will Zeebox be able to leverage News Corp’s reach in their US launch? We’ll be excitingly watching as more money makes its way into social TV.

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Zeebox is one of these apps that launched in the UK that we’re extremely excited to see. It launched in early November with very good reviews. Available on iPad, iPhone and Zeebox.com, it combines a social program guide with real-time tweets and (for internet-connected TVs) a remote control, as well.

Anthony Rose, Zeebox’s Co-Founder and CTO designed BBC’s second screen iPlayer and previously he was CTO of KaZaA, one of the extremely popular post-Napter peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms. Ernesto Schmitt, a former marketing executive at EMI, is the other co-founder.

Launching in a market that’s not already filled with a plethora of popular second screen app options already puts them at an advantage. While the app is currently only for the UK, they could easily start winning over hearts to help provide a second screen option for a European pay TV market that amounts to $76 billion.

Rose’s official comment regarding Zeebox’s US launch is still that its, “planned for early 2012,” and that in the UK so far, “user feedback’s been great.” One of the most impressive features that Zeebox launched with is the built-in remote control for connected TVs. “We found Connected TVs from Sony, Samsung, LG and Panasonic, cracked the protocols they used so Zeebox can act as a remote control,” he said. “It’s much easier then remote control apps, you don’t need to buy any IR blasters,” he added.

Rose made it clear that Zeeboz is, “not just social,” but “to be a great consumer experience.” When building Zeebox he recognized that a lot of social TV apps pile in social features that aren’t necessarily useful. This is especially true if a user doesn’t have enough Facebook friends using the app, he explained. He also criticized apps that just cater to program discovery. “The problem with just program discovery,” he explained, is, “what do you do for the next hour while you’re watching.” “It needs to help you find a program and then stay engaged.”

His description of what Zeebox is trying to do sounds very promising. “Zeebox is a cloud, a spider for live television, like Google spider’s the internet,” he described. Zeebox includes, ad recognition (“Click to buy what on TV”, just soft-launched to allow users to buy items as they appear on TV), speech recognition, editorial and crowdsourced data all in one. “The display lights up and ticks along with z-tags, the information, clicking takes you to a topic page,” where links to buy items for example on Amazon will soon start appearing. Smartly, Zeebox will also be a Facebook app, coming soon.

Here’s a Zeebox video demo from the company:

We’ll let you know when Zeebox launches in the US.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.