Stevie, the Tel Aviv-based social TV startup we started covering in 2012 is continuing to innovate through curation. Like TV programmers and schedulers who spend endless hours placing TV in a certain linear format for viewers, Stevie is trying to make sense of celebrities’ massive influence on social to offer premium content.
At the beginning of the month Stevie launched its new Celebrity Tweet TV app, “letting viewers watch non stop TV channels of what their favorite celebrities are sharing in real time,” according to the company. CEO and Founder Yael Givon, described their process behind the celebrity curation:
Some celebrities are a no brainer, the ones users expect to see – Rihanna, Lady Gaga or Britney etc. Our criteria is even in these cases to be able to create something that is instantly different from E or TMZ – so if a celebrity of their magnitude shares only stories created about them in traditional media we’ll be less interested than with the ones that actually share back stage photos and videos, and have genuine conversations on Twitter (even if their publicist does most of the posting).
AdvertisementWith other artists and athletes, we thought we can do more – People like Louis CK, Russel Brand or LeBron James, you wish you could watch hours of their performances and gags put there’s nowhere to really immerse yourself in their content world, (except for a linear playlist on YouTube maybe). Here we could bring a channel that’s like nothing else out there.
The last criteria was the celebrities that have really fallen in love with social media and are being creative on their accounts, sharing content they love and become curators of some awesome channels to watch.
Check out John Cusack for a mix of politics, old movie clips and great music; Cool and artsy videos on the Joseph Gordon Levitt channel, previews and short films mixed with personal photos on the Kevin Spacey channel, and tech and inspiration from Ashton Kutcher.
When creating this app we wanted to celebrate these famous people who openly share and talk to their fans – and we based channels on the stars’ own (official) online sources (Twitter, Facebook or other). That means that while content from multiple sources is still gathered, meshed and televised, each channel will be centered around the celebrity’s own curation around each star’s point of view.
We’ve also included a few celebrities that don’t share enough content, but have great #hashtags on Twitter like Lena Dunham and Heidi Klum