Interview with SnappyTV CEO, Mike Folgner

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mike Folgner, Founder of SnappyTV and winner of “Best Social Idea” at the Social TV Summit. I asked him questions about the company and his views on the future of Social TV. Let me know what you think:

Krystelle Lorraine: What exactly is SnappyTV?

Mike Folgner: “One of the things that we’re trying to get traction on with Snappy video, SnappyTV allows you to share moments from the broadcast as soon as it airs and I know a lot of actors and television shows are simultaneous tweeting with the broadcast now and we’re trying to get adoption of our platform so that when you’re tweeting with the broadcast, you can share the snippets of the broadcast with it so your Twitter followers or Facebook fans can see exactly that moment in time that you’re talking about. The benefit of that is that people that aren’t necessarily watching the show, you might be able to lure them to watch the show by sharing some of the content.”

Krystelle: Are you interested In Celebrity Endorsements or Networks Having Talent use your product while tweeting?

Mike: “Absolutely. I think that if there are people that are tweeting with shows, and we can kind of. Shows either that we have relations with or we can form a relationship with. And then have them or you use Snappy as a tool, I mean I think it’s good for all people involved. It’s good for the show because the word of the show is getting out. It’s good for the celebrity, because their fans are able to get better content. It’s good for us because people get exposure to the platform.

Krystelle: How do you monetize your company?

Mike: “The short answer is: we’re figuring it out. And I think that different content owners or rights holders want to use us in different ways, so we’re flexible on how to do it. But the models that we’re exploring are either CPMB’s or LifeUsing. Technology LifeUsing. Either one. We are somewhat flexible on the platform. It kind of depends of what the objectives are of the content owner on what the right model is.”

Krystelle: And you’re still in development on all that?

Mike: “We’ve got examples of both models. I think we’re remaining flexible as a relatively young start-up. We’re remaining flexible on what the model is.”

Krystelle: What about the International Use of Content? Is there a eestriction on how long the clips can be posted?

Mike: “The content owner, the rights holder, tells us for that specific content, where it exists, how long it exists, how long the clip is, so what we’ve created is a platform for sharing live television that lets the appropriate rights holder or content owners configure the system so that those rules are applied. So the different rules are: it can be like the length of the clip or if it expires after a certain time. We can configure that on a per show basis or per user basis so that when these get shared they respect the digital rights that currently exist in the contracts. Different shows and different events have different rights and so what we do is we work with the rights holders to understand what those parameters are and then we can make this happen with the existing parameters.”

Krystelle: How did you come up with the idea for SnappyTV?

Mike: “I saw a lot of my Facebook feed and Twitter feed referencing what I was seeing in television, what people were seeing in television. I would see people talk about a World Cup goal or something they watched on American Idol, you know, ‘That song rocked on American Idol.’ And, so, I saw this on Facebook and Twitter and my thought was, ‘Why can’t I see the video that these people are talking about?’ It’s no longer on broadcast. It’s off broadcast and it’s not gonna be up on the web yet and then there’s a missed opportunity here for the content owner to get a fan. If I wasn’t watching it but all my friends were talking about it, the best way for me to maybe tune in next time is for them to show me some content and tell me where I can see it. And, so, I experienced this myself and when we started researching we saw that we weren’t the- It was a massive problem. There’s a ton of tweets and a ton of Facebook posts during these live events and that the video just isn’t available inside the window where people are talking about it. So he said why don’t we build a real-time TV sharing platform that let’s people share about what they’re talking about on TV with their friends on Facebook and Twitter. That’s kind of how we came to the notion of Snappy TV.”

Krystelle: What has been the most successful type of TV for you?

Mike: “We see different patterns on both [Live TV and pre-recorded TV.] If you just look at the Twitter data, the live, kind of never happened before, content has a lot of immediate Twitter impact that lends itself well for what we do.  We really get performance on things that there’s high Facebook and Twitter volume. You can look at different show tags for those research products to understand which shows have a lot of activity around the time of broadcast. And any of those shows tend to lend themselves well to real-time TV sharing.”

Krystelle: Are you working with Internet Trending Sites or are you doing your own research in house?

Mike: “We have our own data source and our own research. So we have a pretty good idea of what shows will work well.”

Krystelle: What do you think are the biggest hurdles facing the success of your company?

Mike: “I’ve done a start-up before. You have the inherent start-up risks of market timing and financing timing, everything like that. Those are the things you can’t control. The stuff that we are working hard on. We’ve spent a lot of time understanding the rights issues involved and approaching this problem from a very price-friendly viewpoint. And, so we’ve built a content management and a rights management system that allows content owners to enable this social sharing, while at the same time, respecting all of the contractual relationships that exist in regards to this content. And, so, the challenge that we had is to communicate that this is a rights-friendly platform and that we understand a lot of the issues involved and we can work with you to enable this with the current rights agreements that you have. Getting that message through to the people that own these shows and are interested in marketing them, is a challenge that we face. But we’re doing a good job and people are very receptive of it because we’re approaching it in the right way.”

Krystelle: Is that the most challenging part of getting content providers to join your program?

Mike: “The most challenging aspect is just talking to them. There’s a lot of them and you’ve just got to get the word out and talk to them. The platform makes sense. This isn’t something that a show owner resists or a celebrity would resist. It actually, when you really think about it, it helps everyone in the ecosystem. It helps the show itself get discovered, because there’s the platform recommending it, I’m more likely to watch it. It helps the carrier/the distributer because we tell the user’s friends to tune into Comcast or DirectTV or whatever. And we tell them to watch it live and tune in now. That’s good for the network or the cable channel, that’s good for the distributor, and it’s good for the show, and also the talent and the people around the show, it’s just another way that they can use social media to communicate with their fans. So not only can I tweet about my show, but I can also share, through Twitter and Facebook, my thoughts on different parts. So you can send out a segment and talk about what actually happened before and after that shot was cut. And that’s a nice edition for your fan base to see. We really think that this is beneficial to everybody involved here and just touching all of those different people involved to get them to see the value is a challenge.”

Krystelle: What can we expect to see in the next year with the development of SnappyTV?

Mike: “I hope to see a large expansion of the platforms so that a much larger number of content owners use SnappyTV for tuning and propagation of their programming. The concept is solid. People like to talk about what they watch on TV, and they talk about it through Facebook and Twitter, and the best thing to share is the actual clip from the TV and so I hope that you’ll just see more of that from a larger variety of content providers and this becomes more ubiquitous as a way to share what you’re watching on TV in social media.”

Krystelle: Do you think SnappyTV will replace sports highlight shows, like Sports Center?

Mike: “No, I definitely just see us augmenting what they currently do. We’re very complementary to existing programming from Sports Center, does a great job, with procuring the rights that they have and doing what they do. Putting it in a package of digestible stuff and we just see us as an adjunct to that. Whether I’m sharing content that ESPN or ABC Sports shows, with my friends, under their brand, whether I’m snapping and sharing something that I see on Sports Center of my favorite team to my friends. All we’re doing is adding another level of value and another way to do what they currently do. Sports Center is just awesome. I don’t see us replacing them. I see us working with them and making what they do even better.”

Krystelle: Are you currently working with Sports Center or is that something you want to do in the future?

Mike: “We’re not currently working with them. When I’m saying that- We have not announced anything with ESPN.”

Krystelle: Do you have plans to partner with the check-in apps, like GetGlue?

Mike: “Absolutely. We’re a platform and part of what we do is after I check into a show on those great services, then what’s the next thing I wanna do is maybe share part of it on them so we do think there’s a great integration. We want to bring the Snappy functionality to any check-in service or any other service that people are using while they’re watching TV. We think it’s a great feature for them to have. So part of our platform approach is enabling TV sharing in a rights friendly way for any app that’s out there where people are talking about what they’re watching on TV.”

Krystelle: Is there any plan to include web or film content into the mix or is it just going to stay TV?

Mike: “Right now we’re really focused on TV. We’re a start-up so our primary focus is really on allowing people to share stuff that they’re watching on television so that’s our primary focus. We think there are other opportunities out there but we’re pretty focused on TV for now.”

Krystelle: Any plan to release the analytical data to advertisers?

Mike: “We don’t know yet. That’s a good question. I think there are multiple opportunities to partner with some of those companies [who provide this data] or to, if we can add a layer of value to what people are sharing for advertisers, then maybe we could do that. But it’s not something we’re focused on right now.”

Krystelle: What do you think is different today that has made social TV as popular as it has become?

Mike: “One of the big differences is the rise of the real-time web and, when I say the real-time web, like with Twitter and Facebook, you write in real time and then your audience reads it on demand. You could always do it in blogs real time but with the shortness and immediacy of Facebook and Twitter with short posts about what I’m doing has made it something now people are describing what they’re doing all the time. Turns out people watched a lot of television and they have very emotional reactions to it. So, really the rise of Facebook and Twitter has yielded this category of conversation online about TV. And that is social TV right now: people talking about TV right now on Facebook and Twitter. That is the biggest category by far of social television. I think the rise of those platforms, the shortness of the messaging, combined with the proliferation of devices that you can author on. You used to have to have a very heavy, hot laptop open on your lap in order to do something like that, while you’re watching TV. Now you can have an iPhone, iPad, even a MacBook Air is just a much nicer experience to kind of browse the web while you’re watching TV. So I think the portability and ease of use on the device size, coupled with this short messaging, real-time conversation through Facebook and Twitter, has lended itself perfectly for people to talk about TV and interact around TV, while they’re watching it. And when it was still internet TV, in early 2000, that just didn’t exist. You had to use the remote or you had to use a clunky machine and Facebook wasn’t there either. It’s really quite a different market then in late 90’s, early 2000’s, when Interactive TV was trying to do it. It’s just much more open and acceptable market right now.”

Krystelle: What was the single most important thing you learned at the Social TV Summit?

Mike: “We were actually showing our product to a lot of people out in the foyer, during the summit, so I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should of to what everyone else was saying cause I was having a lot of side conversations in the lobby.  Out of the stuff that I watched, I thought that the Shazam platform statistics were very impressive in terms of the size of impact they got with their ad styles. And then I really liked the social media advertising stunt with the billboard on Sunset Boulevard [Vampire Diaries, Catch VD.] They put that up there and that went crazy. Like without Facebook and Twitter you couldn’t do that. The word just doesn’t spread fast enough. The size of the Shazam numbers were impressive and that “Catch VD” campaign was small budget, really outside the box thinking. I was really impressed with that. I thought that was great.”

Krystelle: Any theme of the Summit that was predominantly there or any striking thing you wanted to share?

Mike: “I think that the striking thing was that there are a lot of people on their iphone, iPad, or computers, while they’re watching television. I think of all the companies that pitched, half the companies started with that, but I think the statistics would show that most of the time while watching television, they’re on Facebook and Twitter.  So it’s something that we’ve really focused on, sharing to Facebook and Twitter as our primary user flow and user objective. And I think that that’s really the way to think about that when you’re thinking of social media.”

Krystelle: Any talk about Google Plus and how that’s going to integrate into the Entertainment Industry or Social TV?

Mike: “I think it’s too early at this conference. Google Plus had had a great launch and it’s a great product but I think for this conference, it was too early to really discuss, outside of just mentioning that it might be there on the table later.  I think it’s got a chance at being successful and I hope it is successful, because I think it would be good to have other platforms out there. Even being an early TV Social conference, I think Google Plus was a little too early for people to have a strong opinion either way.”

Krystelle: Where do you see Social TV in the next five years? Where do you see it headed beyond that?

Mike: “I think that this concept of Social TV is going to be integrated very heavily into devices that I hold in my hand, while I’m watching TV, and I think it will also be integrated very heavily into video through Twitter or any other platforms that arise dealing with the real-time web and social or informational relationships. I think thematically that those things- the data that I see and the trends that I see. People are on those devices while watching TV. They want to interact with their friends, they wanna interact with the content, in light ways, in light easy ways. Cause it can’t be too distracting if you’re actually watching TV.  I think that you’re going to see intense integration with the control form on those devices so those devices are controlling what I’m watching. I think that the social networks are going to play a big part into recommending from friends what to watch or seeing what my friends are saying, or participating in games, gaming-type activities during the television with my friends. I think the devices and social networks and the television on the screen, are going to have a high degree of interaction, but each will serve its own purpose. I think that the TV on the wall will primarily be the TV on the wall, and not this place where you’re Facebook chatting and doing these other things. I think that that device will stay primarily [a TV.] If Apple releases a television with application platform, all bets are off. That is the one company that could really change how all that works.”

Krystelle: What are your views on spoilers from content being shared throughout multiple time zones? Anything put in place to stop this from happening?

Mike: “We already have a system in place that deals with that. We time delay clips shared by time zones or by the user’s geographical location. So we already do that. We already handle that. That’s one of the many features that content owners like because we solved that problem for them. Whereas, clips in the wild, uploaded to YouTube or otherwise, don’t have that feature and there are spoilers. Spoilers exist. We allow the sharing of TV clips that basically allows the content owners to manage whether or not they want that to happen. “

Krystelle: So how does that work?

Mike: “If you snap something in New York, your friends in L.A. have to wait until that show airs in their time zone until they see that moment that you shared.”

Krystelle: So how would it appear?

Mike: “Yes a thumbnail that is not yet playable and it tells you to watch the show. The message is there. There’s somewhat of a spoiler, but not a video spoiler. What the video is, it will tell you to tune in tonight to see what Krystelle is talking about.”

We would like to thank  Mike Folgner , Founder of SnappyTV, for letting me interview him. We highly recommend SnappyTV and hope that you all use it when watching your favorite TV shows.