Brian Rolapp, COO, NFL Media, discusses the league’s deal with Twitter and what it means to the National Football League experience.
He says the NFL is happy with the partnership.
Tag Archives: Twitter
Announcing the SnappyTV Audience Network
SnappyTV has always at the leading bleeding edge of bringing video and social media together. Since our beginnings, we have been iterating on the idea of how we can bring great content together with the right users at the right time and in the right place.
Over time, we’ve been adding more and more integrations working with world-class partners and today, we’re please to announce the SnappyTV Audience Network, the premiere distribution platform for content owners to get real-time video out to the web and in front of as large of an audience as possible.
Working with premiere customers like the PGA, Pac-12 Enterprises, the CW and CNN has driven us to marry our unique, industry-leading real-time cloud-based editing capabilities with other leading platforms to create best-of-breed experiences for everyone to benefit from. Let’s walk through the various areas where we can help you get your real-time highlights in front of your audience while they are still buzzing about the crazy dunk, the surprise elimination, or the breaking news story.
Social Media
SnappyTV has integrated tightly with social media allowing our customers to live tweet highlights, broadcast live streams directly to fans in a Facebook feed, post hilarious captioned memes to Tumblr, and to create real-time breaking news stories using Storify. This is something our customers are doing everyday and with great success.
Export Clips to OVP & CMS
SnappyTV customers like Pac-12 Enterprises and the National Lacrosse League loved the powerful capabilities of our LiveCut Editor, but with investments in building audiences and infrastructure on top of other video platforms have worked closely with us to deliver workflow productivity improvements in getting content from live streams and over-the-air broadcasts to their web presences on Ooyala (Pac-12) and YouTube (National Lacrosse League). Using our tools, our customers can create highlights of content just after it happens, apply relevant metadata, and export the video to their CMS of choice getting content onto their channels in seconds, not days.
Mobile Notifications
SnappyTV customers have used our integrations with PushIO and Phizzle to push real-time highlights directly to fans via mobile devices in both a native app and SMS environment. Working with PushIO and the PGA, we were able to send fans real-time highlights of the 2012 Ryder Cup created in our LiveCut Editor directly to anyone who had the Ryder Cup iOS app installed. Our integration with Phizzle was used by FOX Sports North to allow fans to scan an on-screen QR Code or text a short code to get an SMS with instant highlights delivered to them.
Video Syndication & Distribution Sites
We have also done integrations with Video Syndication and Distributions sites like 5min video. Using our LiveCut Editor, TechCrunch is able to create clips of their conferences and live events in a fraction of the time it used to take. In fact, using our technology, the TechCrunch team was able to edit every one of the 100+ Hackathon Presentations at TechCrunch Disrupt and have them posted online just a few minutes after the last presentation was over. Then, once the clips were created, what was usually a manual upload process, where videos were uploaded 1-by-1 was replaced by an automatic integration in which clips surfaced in the 5min platform to be distributed on TechCrunch.com and other syndications sites like Metacafe, AOL.com, and Answers.com.
What This All Means
Online video is still experiencing explosive growth. And yet, what we’re learning is that not all video is created equal. The videos that garner the most attention are those that are able to reach their audience through as many platforms as possible. A platform in this case, can be a hardware platform like a phone or tablet, it could mean a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook, or even a video delivery platform like YouTube or your Ooyala-powered Web Site.
With SnappyTV, we let you maximize your video’s full potential by ensuring frictionless, near real-time viewing of live content. So the next time a breaking news story hits, or a half-court shot gets hit, or a fan favorite contestant gets eliminated, make sure that you’re running your video on SnappyTV. That way you can get that video in front of your audience while they are still buzzing, maximizing exposure, viewership and vitality by giving your viewers exactly what they are looking for where they are looking.
Want to learn more about SnappyTV? Get in touch and see it in action!
Inauguration Day with CNN
It was an exciting day today at SnappyTV. Working closely with the CNN team, we provided viewers on CNN.com with the ability to instantly share highlights from President Obama’s Inauguration festivities directly from the CNN homepage. If you watched the broadcast live on CNN’s homepage, you might have noticed a carousel of clips just beneath their live player.
Here’s how it worked. CNN editors were in our LiveCut Editor, as important moments happened, they would cut a clip in real-time, add a caption and publish it out to the carousel. Users who were already engaged with the live stream would see the new clip pop in and could watch the real-time highlight, share it to Twitter and Facebook, or embed it on a blog or website. Take a look at the experience:
(excuse the choppy video, thats due to the screen capture software I was using)
What’s more is that once clips were shared into Twitter and Facebook, or embedded on websites, they included our unique Tune-In Banner, that includes a branding, a call to action and a customizable URL click-through that was used to point highlight viewers within social to click and watch the remainder of the live stream on CNN’s website.
Why this matters to you
The most exciting thing about this for SnappyTV is that we are now able to augment the real-time highlights we’ve always been able to produce in the LiveCut Editor and combine it with a Live Streaming Companion widget that you can use to provide the live highlight capability directly to viewers of ANY live stream. Whether you are using UStream, Livestream, YouTube Live, or any other live streaming service (homegrown or off the shelf), you can now use our Live Streaming Companion widget to provide your viewers with instant, bite-sized clips that they can instantly share.
What we’ve seen so far is that by empowering your viewers with instant highlights can lead to some real buzz on social media about your live event, and ultimately drive eyes back to the live event directly impacting your bottom line and helping you get your message out to as wide an audience as possible.
SnappyTV is real-time, social video, and we’ve demonstrated once again, how we live up to that claim. Want to learn more about SnappyTV? Get in touch and see it in action!
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:
Continue reading New VTweet Feature Brings Tweets to Life
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.
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