A German startup named wywy (“why why”) has just landed a $3 million investment to bring a TV synchronization product to market. While there are several ACR (“automatic content recognition”) companies already playing in the social TV space, wywy says its technology is unique because it can synchronize devices to TV to the second, accounting for the delay a viewer experiences by watching a live broadcast via satellite, for example.
The world of synchronized second-screen experiences is still in its infancy, and wywy is betting it will explode. “In the next few years TV viewing will undergo massive changes, particularly in the field of interactivity,” said Dr. Andreas Schroeter, co-founder of wywy. The startup is pitching second screen startups, broadcasters, middleware (set top box) companies and advertisers — not only for content recognition, but for viewer behavior tracking, as well.
The technology comes from wywy’s newly-announced majority stake in Idioma, a broadcast monitoring and audio fingerprinting company. The service is set to go live in Germany and other European countries with over 30 channels this summer.