Broadcasters want the widest possible spread of their show and to drive deep user engagement, but their relationship to sharing on the internet is slightly odd. Youtube videos get taken down, but many broadcasters are still sharing clips and episodes through their own video portals.
To help drive the same type of Twitter and Facebook engagement helps find a new audience, Finnish startup Tellyo calls themselves the easiest way to share TV moments. their standalone app and integrated solutions work as a way to record and share the TV you’re watching live, to share with your friends.
If you haven’t seen our past coverage, the app allows users to basically press a “record” button that grabs the last 30 seconds of content broadcasted. So if you see a crazy moment on TV you want to share, Tellyo allows you to quickly grab that content and get it out to your friends.
The company has just finished up a pilot with Spanish public broadcaster RTVE with the Spanish Master Chef program. Rather than using Tellyo’s standalone solution, they’ve plugged in Tellyo’s technology into Master Chef’s second screen app.
CEO Kimmo Koivisto points out that this pilot has really gotten the ball rolling with their company. He tells us that potential customers have always like the use case, but the the big question was whether there were issues with the copyright that needed to be solved. Now that this pilot is out there, they’ve began getting more attention with broadcasters across Europe.
One thing that CTO Jakub Majkowski points out is how fast they were able to move with RTVE. Tellyo only met RTVE at the Mobile World Congresss at the end of February, and in March began testing their solution. In April they prepared the pilot, and in May the pilot began.
“We managed to do it in two months, and this is with a public broadcaster. In that sense it was really incredible what we managed to do.”
The show was farily popular in Spain, with about 3 million average viewers and peaked at 6.2 million at the finale. Over 170,000 users downloaded the app, with 80,000 video clips shared.
During the season finale, Tellyo saw about 2000 simultaneous users and hundreds off clip requests per minute, which was a good sign their solution can scale. But they’re still learning from the pilot how users have interacted with the clip sharing, and what they want to get out of it.
Tellyo has an interesting looking future ahead of them, as they are launching with a major Finnish broadcaster in September. Unlike RTVE’s pilot of one program, Tellyo will be plugged into top products and related content.
One thing that will be curious to see is if Tellyo will be able to plug into any sports broadcasting, which I imagine will be their bread and butter. Cooking competition shows are all good and well, but Tellyo would be able to drive a huge amount of in-the-moment online engagement for football and other sports – everyone wants to share a great play that happened seconds ago on Facebook or Twitter.
Tellyo has raised a total of around €120,000 from the Nokia Bridge program, their own investment, and Tekes.
