Out of 10 companies that pitched the crowd at the Social TV Summit — with just two-minute demos — SnappyTV won the award for the best social TV idea.
While people love to share their reactions while watching live TV, “what’s missing from that conversation is the video,” explains CEO Mike Folgner. Typically, video clips show up on the web well after the broadcast, which offers “very little benefit for the content ecosystem,” he says. So SnappyTV allows viewers to “snap” and share short video highlights from TV nearly instantaneously, capitalizing on the immediate social conversation. On Twitter, you share a link. On Facebook, you’ll share an embedded video player of the clip.
So how does it do it? When you download the SnappyTV iPhone app, check to see if the show you’re watching on TV is one of SnappyTV’s content partners. If it is, select it and touch “snap” at the exact moment you want to share. You can edit the clip a bit, and share it to Facebook (below) or Twitter.
The challenge for SnappyTV, of course, is landing enough content partners. It currently has Fox shows like Family Guy, Bones and MasterChef. HDNET, CSPAN and NASA TV, too. And the PBS Newshour, which also uses SnappyTV internally to quickly grab and share moments from the broadcast, gaining precious minutes over YouTube upload time.
SnappyTV’s pitch for content owners is the instantaneous sharing fuels tune-in, just like live-tweets and hashtags. Snappy video players include call-outs to encourage viewers to turn on the live broadcast, and partners can access back-end analytics to see how much clips were snapped and shared.
SnappyTV also works for live events, as you can see in this collection of clips snapped from the Social TV Summit, some posted 60 seconds after they happened live.
Stay tuned for more stories from the Social TV Summit over the next few days