By Allan Maurer
CHARLOTTE, NC – People don’t just sit in front of a TV and passively watch whatever broadcasters offer any more. They watch sitting in front of an open laptop or iPad while surfing the web, or checking email on a smartphone. “Whatever that other screen is,” says Garth Moulton, president and co-founder of OtherScreen, “It takes away from their engagement level, which is something terrifying to broadcasters and advertisers alike.”
Previously, Mouton was a co-founder at Jigsaw.com and helped build the company’s database to over 22 Million business contacts and 4 Million company records while managing their community of over 1.5M content generating members from day one through the company’s recent sale to Salesforce.com (for $142M) in April of 2010.
More than 80% of mobile device users report using their phone, tablet or computer while watching TV and, ordinarily, that Internet usage is uncorrelated to the broadcast event they’re watching. The OtherScreen team thinks this represents a large business opportunity.
OtherScreen, founded in December 2010 by Mouton and CEO Chris Halligan, and Andrew Gertig, pushes content to that “other screen” that converges with the live broadcast a user is watching.
Making broadcast TV more fun and stickier
The company, which started development in February, recently launched in beta. It received an innovation grant from NC Idea earlier this year. At the time, Halligan said, “Our product pushes what we call ‘companion content’ to a consumer’s Internet device along side live televised events like sports games, award shows, news programs and reality shows. The results of small alpha test groups over the last few months have shown us that using OtherScreen significantly changes the way people interact with television.”
“By providing highly relevant ‘companion content’, we make normal broadcast events more fun, social and sticky,” said Gertig. “We also generate unique metrics regarding user behavior and reaction to selected broadcast content. In some ways, we’re like a real time AC Nielsen.”
Right now, says Moulton, the company is creating that companion content itself, but expects to quickly convert to a community/crowd-sourced model. “Our first channel for sports has a fanatical base of users,” he says. Sports, he notes, is the “last bastion of of live events that people don’t use a DVR to timeshift.”
The content includes polls, quizzes, information, and user comments.
He says he expects OtherScreen to tap into the same “Tom Sawyer thing” that Jigsaw did, “Where people come in and paint the fence and love doing it. We think we can prime the pump, then get people who are experts – the kid at Arizona State who knows all the key people in State basketball and wites a blog – not because we’re paying him but because we put his name up in bright lights.”
User provided content is a highly marketable product if you can get it. Facebook certainly is doing will with it. It’s still experimenting with how much content to push at users.
Advertisers can also use the OtherScreen technology to ask users questions about commercials (will the word “pizza” appear in any of the ads?). “We had people cheer because they guessed it might be,” says Moulton. People not only sit through the ads using the OtherScreen technology, “They comment on them,” he says.
The company will monetize selling subscriptions, virtual goods, and customized channels, Moulton says. The company wants to raise a venture round by the end of the year.
Here’s a video on how it works:
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Tags: Andrew Gertig, Chris Halligan, companion content to broadcast TV, Garth Moulton, NC IDEA, NC Startups, OtherScreen
