Ever wanted to get more information about a TV show, film or advert on TV? Of course you have. But Googling what you can see is easier said than done. What we need is something which recognises the show and can take you to more info – even let you share what you’re watching on social networks.
TVTak does exactly this. Download the app, point your iPhone at the TV, take a picture and TVTak will present more information, links and a way to Tweet or Facebook what you are watching. It’s literally magic.
This is like like Shazam for video in realtime, on a live broadcast. The app works out the location of the iphone via GPS, thus suggesting which country you are in.
There are obvious implication for promotions. One click to test drive a car for instance. It’s effectively the TV’s old Red Button, transported to the iPhone. It even works on business cards.
The drawback, alas, is that in order to scale in each country, TVTak will have to index and tag all TV channels for a country. No mean feat, but they seem confident of this and are indexing broadcasts initially in France and Israel.
The team of five, including Yuval Hada as CTO and David Amselem, have a background in video editing.
The startup is Boostrapped on personal money and will provide an SDK to broadcasters and advertisers.
Since it is notoriously hard to sell to broadcasters, it’s going to be easier to get traction by index the video itslf and get a viral effect from people using the app.