There are a plethora of startups that offer a social, second-screen experience to watching televsion including TV Tune-In, GetGlue, Miso, and Tunerfish. Today, a new player is throwing its hat in the ring, but adding a new twist—the ability to share clips of video from television shows. SnappyTV is a social tune in platform that lets consumers clip video while they are watching and send to their Facebook and Twitter friends.
Like the competition, SnappyTV is a second-screen experience for television shows, meaning that it is meant to be used on a computer or mobile device while watching a show on an actual television. While some startups have focused on the check-in, or games in the TV tune-in world, SnappyTV is focused on encouraging users to share snippets of video from TV partners. So a users who is watching Top Chef on Bravo will be able to access clips of the show on SnappyTV, and share these clips directly to Twitter and Facebook.
The beauty of the platform is that the user can actually select any scene or period (the maximum clip lasts for 20 seconds) within a TV show and create a mini-clip to share with their social graph. The startup has actually created a lightweight video editing tool that allows a viewer to use arrows to move forward and backward in a video clip to get the exact moment. The user can send out a message with a link to the clip, and the video can then be viewed within Facebook or will lead viewers back to either SnappyTV or the content provider’s site.
The startup, which has raised $2 million in angel funding, has launched with a number of big-name TV content providers including Fox and Bravo. For these channels, Snappy gives them insight into the most compelling and shared areas of a show.
And the big pitch for content owners and networks is that it provides a second-screen experience that actually disseminates and advertises actual content (and they have control over which content and how much content is shared because of the clip limits). SnappyTV also offers an API to networks that allows them to embed and white-label the startup’s technology on content provider’s sites.
The startup’s founders also founded online video editing software Jumpcut, which was sold to Yahoo in 2006.
