#augmented tv

Credit has to be given to Zeebox for taking the initiative to not only create the application and bring it to market, but also to have established an open platform, “Showtime”, that will allow developers to plug into the Zeebox world.

The event was hosted by Pinewood Studio Group and held at Theatre No7 at the iconic Pinewood studios. There were probably around 80 people present for the event and together with Zeebox, seven other presenters. These were BT Agilemedia, Exmachina, IMImobile, MIG mobile interactive, Monterosa, TellyBug and III Visiware.

Anthony Rose gave an initial picture of the landscape for Zeebox and the things to watch out for in the coming weeks. (Weeks seem to be the paradigm for this company, having only been founded just about a year ago. Months are not in their vocabulary.)

Some of the key takeaways from Anthony Rose were that in order to succeed, second screen applications would have to be cross platform and not just tied to one telco or broadcaster. He also listed a few things to come such as HTML5 apps that can be added into the Zeebox platform, song recognition and a family more for Twitter. They will also soon be merging the Facebook and Twitter social graphs and even provide a facility for friends to book a timeslot to watch a future TV event together.

Simon Miller of Zeebox followed on to talk more about “Open Box, Showtime” as a platform to allow brands to be developed for Zeebox by programme makers. He also mentioned some interesting statistics such as their research has shown that 93% of viewers using Zeebox stay to the end of the show who have been using the Showtime platform. And a additionally, 50% click on the Zeetags.

Danny Boyle who heads up the Zeebox Insight team then presented his overview of the powerful analytics that become possible through second screen integration. These are an extremely valuable part of any second screen proposition and needless to say, all the data is there in abundance.

The remaining few hours were given over to associate businesses that each provide some angle on the delivery of the second screen experience. BT Agilemedia demonstrated their technology used to support 11M viewers of the X Factor together with a quiz management system used for the Gadget show. Exmachina showed how their technology would be integrated into Zeebox to support prediction interaction for a football match together with content for trivia and quiz games.

Some of the other businesses worth a mention include TellyBug. They have developed the technology to support mass audience feedback into a single broadcaster. They are able to scale up to 500,000 viewers and push the feeds back into the studio in less than 3 seconds. In the example of Britain’s got talent, they supported 3.5M buzzes, which was 11 times more than the number of twitter comments for the programme.

Finally, Visiware’s Laurant Weill presented an interesting overview of his company and managed to shock the audience (except Anthony Rose, who guessed correctly) that to support 200,000 users for a game show, for one hour using the PlayAlong TV experience it would cost just £90! Nobody did actually manage to get under the skin of where the other hidden costs may be, but it was certainly an eye opener.