Caption Now! Vampire Diaries App goes live!

SnappyTV partnered with the CW’s Vampire Diaries to launch an app that offered viewers the opportunity to capture an image during a live show and add their own caption. The images are then added to a gallery where the creator can post them to Facebook, Twitter, or email them to a friend. The results of the app generated some hilarious results as viewers tested their wit against the screen captures.

Vampire Diaries "Caption Now"

As a user, I loved using this app during the live episode. It made me wish that I had it for every show I watch!

Featured Captions on CW website

X Factor #OhSnap

SnappyTV powered the instant fan highlights for last night’s X Factor’s Top 8 live performance show. As the contestants took the stage, audience members were able to clip and share moments instantly from the broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.

X Factor promoted show snaps on Twitter using #OhSnap and prompting the audience to go share their clips. 

New VTweet Feature Brings Tweets to Life

Have you ever read a tweet and wished that you could actually see what the person was referring to? Take this Tweet for example:

SnappyTV CEO Interviewed on TechCrunch TV

Our CEO, Mike Folgner, was interviewed today by TechCrunch TV at their Disrupt conference. We’ve been working with them to produce real-time highlights of the conference, pushing the clips to social media and also to TechCrunch’s 5min CMS. I guess they liked it so much they felt compelled to bring Mike on air. Take a look at the interview:

FOX Sports North Delivers Live, Mobile Highlights Powered by SnappyTV and Phizzle

During the WCHA Conference Hockey Tournament in March, SnappyTV teamed up with mobile marketing agency Phizzle and FOX Sports North to deliver live, instant highlights directly to fans’ mobile devices. Posting a QR code directly on the TV screen, FOX Sports North encouraged fans to “scan for highlights” of that game. After scanning the code, Phizzle steered fans to an HTML5 page of highlights optimized for mobile viewing and hosted by SnappyTV. Over three days and five live broadcasts, over 10,000 people scanned the code, resulting in over 40,000 views of FOX Sports North content.

See how this appeared on air:

Check out the experience yourself using the QR code below. We’ve linked it to FOX Sports North’s daily highlights of the Paul Allen Show on KFAN, so content will be fresh every weekday.

This project comes on the heels of an earlier one allowing high school football fans to text in a keyword and receive instant highlights on their mobile phone. You can try this now by texting “prep zone” to 234234.

Want to learn more about how SnappyTV can help you connect with and deliver content to your fans? Send an email to sales@snappytv.com and one of our team members will get in touch.

New Features and Updates on SnappyTV – May 10, 2012

That’s right – new features on SnappyTV! After weeks of building great new capabilities into our platform, the team is excited to share them. We’ve taken the LiveCut Editor and injected more power with the addition of frame accurate editing, improved playback scrub, and the ability to change thumbnail images, turned up the influence of Social Volume with suggested clips, and given our Partner Portal a major facelift. Let’s dig in and take a closer look at each feature.

Frame Accurate Editing
Creating the perfect clip using our SnappyTV LiveCut Editor has never been easier. We’ve kept the option to adjust in and out points by a single second, and added new frame accurate editing capability to get even more precise. Use the new buttons, located on either side of the clip preview areas, to move forward or backward a frame. In the timecode box, there’s also an additional set of numbers added that represent frames – meaning the timecode format is HH:MM:SS:FF – and can be adjusted by typing directly into that box.

Playback Scrub
The video scrub experience inside the LiveCut Editor has been updated to provide a shorter load time and incorporate frame accuracy. After launching the tool, all video should load within 3-to-5 seconds, and the playhead can then be used to scrub back-and-forth within the video. Because of these changes, you’ll notice a second or two of lower-quality playback after each scrub as the player gets up to speed.

Change Thumbnail Images
Inside the LiveCut Editor, you now have the ability to change the thumbnail image that appears prior to playback or when a clip is embedded. When editing a clip, you’ll notice the “Mark” button under the video feed is replaced by a “Change Thumb” button. To change the image, move the playhead to the one you’d like to use in the timeline, hit “Change Thumb,” then click “Save Changes.” The thumbnail should update on the right-hand side of the interface. Currently, the thumbnail will only update IF you hit the “Save Changes” button.

Suggested Clips in the LiveCut Editor
Our Social Volume tool uses a customizable set of keywords to paint a picture of the social conversation happening around your content, allowing you to see the moments fans are talking about. Now, with Social Volume on, SnappyTV maps out a set of suggested clips, that can be customized to an individual or select group of keywords, for you in the LiveCut Editor. Check the keywords you want to include, take a look at the timeline, and click the blue tick mark to start editing. It’s that easy to identify and engage with fans around their favorite moments.

Partner Portal Refresh
The Partner Portal is built to handle details behind-the-scenes, providing access to a variety of admin functions, including scheduling, rights management, branding, and generating widget code. Over the past few weeks, we’ve given it an overhaul – a fresh new look, simplified forms, and better experience overall. The tabs and links previously along the top of the page have moved into a left-hand navigation panel, separated by type of function (i.e. Content, Analytics, Settings), making it easier to maneuver quickly and find what you’re looking for.

Questions or Comments?
Want to learn more or chat about any of these new features? SnappyTV would love to hear from you, and we’re always on the lookout for feedback. Just send us an email at contact@snappytv.com and a member of the team will get in touch. Until then, enjoy!

What is Your Show's Social Volume?

SnappyTV has rolled out a new product called Social Volume. Its like SoundCloud, but for TV.

Social Volume allows you to see the “loudest” moments of the social conversation during the show. Based on keywords that you specify, we visualize the loudness of the real-time social conversation via the Social Volume Sound Wave, letting you and your viewers quickly discover the key moments that everyone is talking about.

Then using the SnappyTV LiveCut Editor, you can create clips that map to the loudest moments in the social conversation to create a fun and engaging viewing experience for your audience.

Forget the Future of TV, Lets Do This Now

follow me on twitter: mfolgs

I’m now old enough to have my own “when I started in this industry…” story, so I’m going to tell it in this post.

I started my career at OpenTV after graduating with an engineering degree from Stanford in 1999.  OpenTV did “interactive TV” probably better than any other company that claimed the function at the time.  I spent as much time as I could learning from the likes of Vincent Dureau and Joel Zdepski about how TV worked and became very good at demos showing how millions would watch Friends then buy Jennifer Aniston’s dress with their remote control.  This was the future of television, buying Jennifer Aniston’s dress.  There was something there, BSkyB sold a ton of Domino’s Pizzas in the UK through the TV and games were a hit, but the behavior around shows and events didn’t really change.

I went back to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and while observing the market from academia some classmates and I saw the market for video changing from tape to digital.  This was a tectonic technological change that we thought would change consumer behavior.  In 2003 there weren’t a lot of digital cameras shipped with video capture but by 2005 it was well over half, so we concluded that it might be a good time to start an online video company, so I found a good techie named Ryan Cunningham and we started Jumpcut.  Chad Hurley and Steve Chen concluded something similar and did a better job of it.  Jumpcut focused on video editing which ended up working for a smaller but valuable group of users that created and shared video.  It turns out that this group was interested in building a community focused around their craft and that advertisers and brands could entice this community into helping them create things like Doritos Superbowl commercials and movie trailers.  The remix button was born and we all did well.

I was then at Yahoo! (after Y! acquired Jumpcut in 2006) and I had the privilege of managing talented teams who had the tough task of competing with YouTube in areas like music videos.  It was a tough competition because Yahoo! had a long standing culture of working with the  video rights holders and did things like only put videos up that they had the rights for, even though people wanted the video that they wanted.  YouTube almost always had the video (with no ads), so category by category it became tougher to compete with that.  We did break new ground with things like the Nokia / Spike Lee video editing challenge where Yahoo!’s community created the assets for a feature length film that Spike Lee edited.  However, it was clear that consumers wanted the video that they wanted (often what they just saw on TV) and went to the place where they could find it.

We all witnessed the rise of Facebook and Twitter and the real-time web, which is actually real time write and on-demand read.  People post in real time as they see things, but others read the posts at various times after that, on-demand.  This has become the new model for communication on the web, actually email is the same way, but Twitter and Facebook have created a spontaneous sharing with the expectation that someone will read it but I don’t really care if any specific person does or not.  It turns out these are good platforms for people to blurt out random thoughts, celebrations, observations, expletives, etc. about the shows they’re watching on TV.  I noticed this while checking Facebook a few hours after a particularly compelling American Idol episode.  Everyone was talking about two of the songs.  10 of 20 messages (hold comments on what this says about my friends) were about that show.  I happened to watch it, but what if I had not seen it?  I went to AmericanIdol.com, no video.  Fox.com didn’t have it either.  Half of my feed was talking about this moment and the video was nowhere to be found online.  It did get posted by the time I checked the next morning but by then the feed had moved on to burnt coffee and baby photos.  What a missed opportunity.

Once I started paying attention, this pattern repeated itself.  Traffic from Landon Donovan’s world cup goal earned him a fail whale and when the feed came back up the chatter was deafening but no video.  DeSean Jackson returned a punt to put a dagger in the hearts of New York Giants fans everywhere.  The internet explodes but almost no video.  The “almost” is because I did find it by searching YouTube 90 minutes later and there it was, with 1.4 million views on one and hundreds of thousands on others.  I did the same search 30 minutes later and that clip was gone but ten others of the same moment with at least 100k views were in line to take its place, all of which were summarily executed.  Again, what a missed opportunity.

That brings us to now, the future of TV.  People post in real time about what they watch on TV.  People also want to share the best moments and talk about them afterward. Content owners should be able to benefit from this instead of trying (and failing) to stop it.

So we decided to create the first rights friendly platform for sharing clips from live television. Content owners can now take advantage of the immense conversation inside Facebook and Twitter about their shows by attaching tune-in information and branding to these show highlights as they virally spread through the web.  Fans get a great way to engage with and talk about the show.  Content owners drive tune-in, audience engagement and revenue.

This post was a bit about my journey but I’ve got a steller team with me including my co-founders Ryan Cunningham, Steve Weibel and Karen Nguyen.  We are doing this today and we have great partnerships with Fox and Bravo (and a number of others that I can’t talk about yet) because they see the same things we do.  It turns out Hollywood and Silicon Valley can work together.