A new wave of social TV startups is emerging in the post-Get Glue era. These platforms aren’t targeting consumers (thus competing with Facebook and Twitter). Instead, they’re creating tools for marketers to create social TV experiences in unique ways across content. Hopskoch is one of these companies that’s built a platform to “create, track and analyze transmedia marketing campaigns on one collaborative” tool. We interviewed Marty Monaco the founder and COO at the company about their goals to make an impact on the TV world.
Lost Remote: What is Hopskoch and why did you create it?
Marty Monaco: Hopskoch is a framework for building integrated, scheduled, and on-the-fly social and multi-platform experiences for television programming (but really for all digital content).
We were inspired by Transmedia storytelling campaigns like the ARG Why So Serious and companies like 4th Wall Studios which pushed the boundaries of immersing your audience into a story. We wanted to create a set of tools that could be used to quickly configure and publish integrated social experiences for televised content. We also had early meetings with the digital team at AMC and drew further inspiration from the plans and concepts that went into StorySync.
LR: What do you think the future of social TV is?
Monaco: Our vision is that in the not too distant future (maybe a year or maybe 3 but) all content will come equipped with a social soundtrack (whether it be integrated experiences, call outs, audience influence or story branching) and Hopskoch plans to be the platform that content owners use to create it.
LR: Anything else?
Monaco: We are not planning to just support scheduled content but to be able to provide integrated experiences for all content types (which now includes, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc.). These content types will need to have a way to “kick off” that experience and that may be via a hashtag or embedded annotations which Hopskoch will also author.