Developer Live Talkback is also powering social features for Britain's Got Talent and British broadcasters
There has been a big buzz around social TV apps in the last year, but much of it has been driven by US startups such as GetGlue, Miso and IntoNow, with the latter recently acquired by Yahoo mere months after launching its first consumer application.
While these apps can be used in the UK, their focus has understandably been on US television schedules. Now there's an app specifically for British couch potatoes, from UK firm Live Talkback. The app is called Tellybug, but as Live Talkback explained in an interview with Apps Blog, it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the company is working with TV producers and broadcasters here.
Tellybug first, though. It's iPhone-only for now, and launched on the App Store this weekend, promising to tell users 'what's worth watching right now based on which shows are creating the most buzz'.
That includes lists of shows that are trending now, and were trending 'last night', based on Live Talkback's data analysis 'We're tracking around 2 million people in the UK who tweet about TV shows,' explains the chief executive, Matt Millar. Users can sign in with their Twitter credentials to see what their contacts have been tweeting about specific shows, while also marking shows as liked and disliked.
'We started with Twitter because we want to be careful not to make any mistakes around dealing with people's privacy,' says Millar. 'Twitter is fundamentally public, but you need to be more careful with Facebook. But also, we want to build connections around TV shows with people who might not be your friends already.'
A strong point of Tellybug is the way it aims to filter tweets by show, which Millar says is based on a mixture of hashtags, show titles and matching other words and phrases – for example, tweets mentioning 'Alan Sugar' can fairly accurately be tied to the about-to-start run of The Apprentice.
The technology is still in development - while testing the app, we found that certain shows with more generic names (Tribe, for instance) still give the system problems in filtering out relevant and non-relevant tweets. Even so, the UK focus makes Tellybug more directly relevant to British TV viewers than its longer-established competitors.
Tellybug is Live Talkback's D2C app, but in many ways it's as much of a showcase for what the company can do on a B2B basis for broadcasters and producers. It already has some high-profile deals to run online and mobile social features for shows and channels, including Britain's Got Talent, Sky News, ESPN and Liverpool FC TV.
The Britain's Got Talent deal is interesting: Live Talkback is running a 'Buzz Off' feature for the reality show, which lets viewers wield their own virtual buzzer to express their disapproval of contestants while the show is airing – and push this out to Twitter and Facebook. It's part of the official Britain's Got Talent app, and also the show's website.
'It's about watching the show, then glancing down to participate,' says Millar. 'We think it's genuinely more fun watching Britain's Got Talent and buzzing along, as well as being able to see how many other people are buzzing.'
In the future, Live Talkback is hoping that the resulting data will be able to be fed back to production teams live, to be used during the actual shows. Head of business development Irwan Owen thinks there will be a tipping point in the not-too-distant future for social TV interaction, 'a time when TV producers will say 'you cannot make this show unless it has an interactive social element.'
Live Talkback is also working with ESPN on providing social voting for its Man of the Match selections during live football matches, while Sky News is also using the Tellybug technology for live viewer polls.
Competition in the social TV space is heating up, and the US startups are well-funded in comparison to Live Talkback's bootstrapped team. However, the company hopes that its UK focus will prove a strength on this side of the Atlantic.
'We're strong believers that a big success in the social TV space can come out of the UK market,' says Owen. 'It's a very coherent TV market, very big and one of the largest syndicated TV markets in the world, so there are many advantages to being here. There's an opportunity to be that big success coming out of the UK, and beating Silicon Valley at their own tech startup game!'
