One of the most social video experiences I’ve ever had on the Web was watching the Obama Inauguration speech on CNN.com alongside a live chat stream of commentary from all of my Facebook friends. It was like being in a giant living room that stretched across the country and hearing everyone’s reaction as the event unfolded.
The same dynamic on much smaller scale is happening with popular TV shows on Facebook and MySpace. Splashcast Media, which has created apps for about 20 different TV shows, two weeks ago introduced a new feature called Chatter into its embedded video players. For instance on Facebook it has apps for The Simpsons, The Office, Family Guy, and more. Once you install each app, you can watch episodes of the show, many of them streamed through Hulu. SplashCast tells me that it is getting about 7 million monthly video views from one million unique viewers across all of its apps, with Hulu videos being the fastest growing proportion of that.
The Chatter feature lets you have conversations both synchronously and asynchronously. You can invite your friends to watch with you and you can all chat on the side, or you can see what other Facebook members previously said about the show at the exact points in the video stream when they said it. Most of the comments are pretty mindless, as you’d expect, but it makes watching more fun.
It also makes online TV more engaging. SplashCast found that adding chat to TV on the Web keeps people’s attention longer. In the two weeks since it introduced the Chatter feature, SplashCast has found that viewing time has gone up 50 percent to an average of 14 minutes, and the number of viewers who watch a video all the way through to the end has gone up 42 percent. That is probably because they are not watching, but reading what people are saying, and it is also probably why SplashCast throws ads into the conversation stream.
CEO Michael Berkley says his ad inventory is “100% sold out” and that app sponsorships are going for $3 cost-per-click rates, which is a healthy price for an ad on Facebook or MySpace. The clickthrough rates on these ads are about 3 percent, he says, which is also above industry norms. How sustainable that is remains to be seen. Clickthrough rates tend to come down as a new type of ad’s novelty wears off and it scales to larger numbers. But if this is the way people are going to start watching TV, advertisers will want to be there as well.
this is the kinda company i hate because I’m mad I didn’t think of it… damnit
I know that feeling, I get that a lot… LoL
it is genius though, it just makes a lot of sense. Surprised hulu.com didn’t think of this.
We launched this feature on the-n.com in 2006, and called it “Vommenting.” But it’s not really about coming up with the idea, it’s about executing it well and have a solid business plan attached. Kudos to Splashcast for running with this concept — there is a lot of potential here still to be realized.
Over the past 10 years many companies have been trying to integrate the passive tv experience and user interaction via the internet. All have failed. But leveraging social networks is an interesting synergy that could really nail this category and have lasting power.
Thanks Erick for the write-up! Good point about the “novelty effect” on click-through-rates of new advertising formats. We keep on expecting our 3% CTR to fall… and it probably will, but it hasn’t since we introduced the app sponsorship products in January.
Very clever idea. I like it.
We’ve come a long way since the VP debates when it took several windows to accomplish this http://www.flic...ell/2908803792/
Wow, some people have way too much time on their hands. I hardly watch tv, let alone, log on and chat about a show with people from the Internet. Sure, it will get some use, but does it really add any value and can you make money off it? I think people on TechCrunch have a disconnect from society in that they believe unfoundedly that normal people like me give a flying you know what about what people accross the Internet think about anything, especially my “friends.”
I’m not going to chat with people as I watch tv. If someone is in the room with me while I watch tv it’s usually silent, and if I do feel like talking to someone about the show, I will talk to the real live person in the room.
This really demonstrates how companies are just grasping at straws for shit they can make that when all is said and done solves no problems and just works to make people less and less social and disconnected from reality.
Who is normal, you or the 1M people a month who watch this stuff? Just sayin’
I think I am. The entire viewing audience for television is about 100-150 million people I think. So 1 million per month divided by 30 days is 33 thousand per day. So that’s 0.022% of the populace. Sure, there’s room for growth, but I just can’t see many people finding much value in this. Time will tell. I have to admit, I like chatting with other listeners during online radio programs.
couldn’t agree more…
Look at the comments on the sample pic of this service. This is what is wrong with society. And I hate to break this to you, but advertising through television, Internet ads, Facebook, etc… it doesn’t work. Ask yourself when the last time is you bought something directly because of an advertisement.
$3 per click? Thats standard?
Above standard.
$3 per thousand impressions seems more likely.. Especially for this kind of stuff (entertainment) there’s no way you can get $3 per click.
3% CTR == 3 clicks per thousand impressions
3$ per click == 9$ per thousand impressions
which is somewhat 2-4 times bigger than a potential Adsense eCPM.
So it’s not such impossible figures.
Everything is fine but in my opinion not all kind of TV programs are suitable for this kind of service. I definitely will never use facebook in the middle of my evening shot of Law & Order.
Eric, I count less than 100,000 users from all their Facebook apps combined.
Can you figure out where this 1M figure came from?
Hi Atul, SplashCast actually has about 40 different TV apps, not all of which show up under a “SplashCast” search in Facebook. Across those apps, there are 300,000 app installs, split evenly Facebook and MySpace. Those installs are currently generating over 1M unique viewers per month, on public profile pages and canvas pages. You don’t have to install the apps to view the videos.
It is great thing to communicate but Everything is fine but in my opinion not all kind of TV programs are suitable for this kind of service. I definitely will never use facebook in the middle of my evening
hmmm, look at the comments. not something i want to do… be bored
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on the whole you have to look at the next generation that are coming into the market. yes these tools and the related conversations seem pretty vacuous but they are incredibly appealing to the likes of my nephews and neices (ages 7 to 16). I was devasted on my last trip, i couldn’t prise any of them away from their texting their friends on MSN. i hadn’t seen them in a year, and all i got was a cursory ‘hi uncle ben’ and then they all got right back to it.
Does anyone remember Knocka TV this is a very similar in design and what the company was planning overall. I am glad to see someone finishing it up!
J.
Did anyone of you really try it? To me it looks like all the message there are fake!
hi…………hello hwru tonight nice to here mm…..w/care po
Very clever idea. I like it.
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