Last November, ten broadcast groups partnered with social TV startup ConnecTV in a major bet on the second screen. Later today, the ConnecTV experience is launching online and for the iPad (now available), and we were given a sneak peek to see how the product works.
As a quick recap, the partners make up a who’s-who list of broadcasters: Gannett, Hearst, Belo, Scripps, Cox, Media General, Meredith, Post-Newsweek, Raycom and Barrington — 201 stations in all. Several groups invested in ConnecTV, to boot. Like many second-screen apps, ConnecTV provides synchronized content and conversations around what you’re watching on TV.
But ConnecTV’s approach is among the most aggressive efforts to achieve scale in the second-screen space. Unlike many specialized apps, it works across a huge swath of programming: 250 national channels, syndicated shows, live sports and local newscasts. “We operate the way you watch TV,” said ConnecTV Co-Founder Ian Aaron in an interview with Lost Remote. “No matter what channel you tune to, you’re going to have an experience. People don’t watch TV and say, ‘I’m going to download the NFL app,’ and then change the channel and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to download the X-Factor app….’ They don’t watch TV like that.”
When you first download the app or visit the site, you can authenticate through Facebook for a seamless login. Using audio fingerprinting, ConnecTV identifies what you’re watching when you check-in. It then serves companion content and conversations synchronized to the broadcast, both live and time-shifted. The shareable content ranges from factoids and polls, and the conversation combines curated tweets (from TV brands, show accounts and personalities) along with ConnecTV’s own internal community. You can see which Facebook friends have “liked” a particular show (on Facebook), and then invite them to join ConnecTV. You can chat with people around a particular show or with all your friends at once.
This is where ConnecTV begans to differentiate itself from most second-screen apps. If you’re watching a sports game, it provides real-time stats and plays. (For now, it covers your core professional and college sports, but they’ll expand to other sports and markets later this year.) If you’re watching a local newscast, it ties into partner stations’ iNews and ENPS computer systems, offering content and conversations synced exactly with the broadcast. In one example, ConnecTV plans to allow users (in some markets) to share their favorite stories from the app to Facebook and Twitter, which will then link the station’s video player with the exact clip cued up. Stations’ social accounts will also appear in the ConnecTV experience.
Through all of this, ConnecTV gathers data in the background (you can set various privacy controls). For example, when people tune in, where they chat the most, and other shows they also watch. “There’s various information that we share to help our broadcast partners program and help them promote content,” Aaron explains, adding that it’s anonymous data. For example, it may know that viewers of Modern Family have a strong cross-over with the syndicated show Anderson, helping WFAA inform its promotional schedule. And of course, ConnecTV tracks the demographics of audiences who are participating around specific shows.
With all this data, ConnecTV also believes it can drive tune-in. In the conversation window, you can not only see what your friends are watching, but ConnecTV provides “interstitial” promos (below) that alert users when a show they’ve watched before is about to air. Broadcaster partners can also extend their TV ad deals into ConnecTV, tying ads to specific broadcasts to amplify on-air spending.
Now to the big question: can ConnecTV achieve enough scale to make it work? Aaron says the local TV partnerships are a key ingredient of the strategy. “[Stations] have a commercial obligation to promote us on TV twice a day and deliver a persistent link from their local web presence” spanning 201 stations and 76 million homes, he said. And that promotion is pointed directly to ConnecTV, not a station-branded app. “This is a departure for broadcasters,” Hearst TV’s Roger Keating told us in November. “We became convinced that it just doesn’t scale for someone to download show-specific or even channel-specific apps.”
While the owned-and-operated stations from the major networks are not part of the partnership, Aaron said ConnecTV has been talking with all of them. “At first, everybody will say, well, we have our own apps,” he said. “But we’re not looking to displace that…. we have something that’s more of a blanket across the whole TV ecosystem.” Aaron said ConnecTV could even promote show-specific second-screen apps.
Aaron says he also believes the second-screen is inherently local. “So much news is local news, so much sports is around your local team,” he told us, adding that most viewers’ friends are local, too. “Watching TV has become more of a localized experience, and we’ve tried to recreate it with this interface and give programmers the opportunity to reach to those local groups. And brands and advertisers, as well.”
ConnecTV is a free iPad app, with smart phone apps coming soon.