Tech Capital Partners Blog

Continuing on in our series of profiling Tech Capital portfolio companies, I recently spoke with Dave Bullock, President of LiveHive Systems about some of the projects they’ve been working on. We met the founders of LiveHive at a WatStart event a few years ago and invested in the company at the end of 2005. It’s been a fun (and wild) ride so far and the company is really hitting its stride, recently closing a deal with NBC for the Olympics as part of “the single most ambitious media project in history.”

1.  What does LiveHive do? And what is tvClickr?

LiveHive creates interactive experiences that are tied to TV broadcasts. Viewers play-along with whatever they’re watching and socialize with other viewers watching the same thing. All a viewer needs is a PC, laptop, or mobile phone, and they can participate in the show by predicting what happens next, answering trivia, and voicing their opinion in real-time polls.

Synchronizing and delivering the whole experience requires a lot of technology - something we’ve perfected over the last 3 years and call the NanoGaming platform. Most of our time at LiveHive is spent working with TV networks, sports teams, and major advertisers to create custom NanoGaming experiences for their TV programming. Besides being a lot of fun for the viewer at home, we create some really amazing interactive advertising opportunities that give sponsors a true dialogue with the viewers.

tvClickr is the B2C side of our business in which we create similar interactive experiences, but we do it for all the top primetime shows on TV. We do this by bringing viewers together on Facebook to connect and compete while they’re watching their favourite shows.

2.  Who are your customers and what pain are you addressing?

With NanoGaming, we’ve had the luxury of working with some of the best companies in media. Historically, we’ve spent a lot of time working with broadcasters to make their sports programming interactive, but that’s recently grown into some other categories like reality TV and awards shows. One of the favourite parts of my job is that we get the chance to produce the interactive component for some incredible TV franchises like Monday Night Football with ESPN and Hockey Night in Canada with CBC… Anytime you get the chance to work with that calibre of programming, you know you’re hitting a killer pain point for the industry.

For the broadcasters, the pain we’re solving really exists on two fronts: First, they’re losing engagement with viewers who are no longer giving 100% of their attention to the TV. Broadcasters now share their viewers’ time with gaming consoles, PCs, and mobile phones. NanoGaming gives them the chance to connect with their viewers through a true two-way channel which has a direct and measurable link to more engaged and loyal viewers. The second part of the pain we’re solving is really an economic one. Advertisers are increasingly finding that the 30-second TV spot is not reaching their consumers… people are ad-skipping, or just not paying attention… And measuring an ad’s effectiveness has a whole host of challenges.

NanoGaming lets a broadcaster’s advertisers connect in a true dialogue with consumers, in a highly measurable way, for an extended period of time. Over the last year we’ve had a chance to brand our NanoGaming offerings under the flag of some of the top advertisers in the world including Coca Cola, Shell, Lexus, and Nissan.

3.  What have you developed for NBC/The Olympics

NBC is doing some really amazing things in their coverage of the Beijing Olympics. As part of their online package, they asked us to create their interactive companion piece to complement their broadcasts each night, something that would allow fans at home to actually predict the action as it was happening and compete with friends while they watch. The offering is called the NBC Prime Time Challenge sponsored by Coca Cola. For every arm-chair athlete sitting at home, this is a really great way to get engaged with the Olympic action each day, and as per usual, there are some cool prizes on the line. But from personal experience, I think bragging rights after kicking your friends’ butts is the best prize going!

4.  Where can we play?

We’re constantly rolling out new NanoGaming offerings, but you can always get an up-to-date list from NanoGaming.com. Right now, our Olympics package can be found at http://primetime.nbcolympics.com and we’ve got a CFL Football game sponsored by Nissan available at http://cfl.nissan.ca.

The nice part about tvClickr is that it guarantees top tier content to play along with every night, all year long. We cover the best reality TV like Big Brother and Survivor, dramas like Gossip Girl or Lost, and even one-off events like award shows or elections. All this action happens inside of Facebook with the tvClickr app, which you can link to from www.tvclickr.com.

5.  What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned over the past 12 months and how are you incorporating this knowledge into your product offerings?

We’re really doing some true-blue trailblazing stuff here at LiveHive, we’re the leaders in building this new sector of the market, and we’re learning a lot of lessons along the way about the right ways and wrong ways to create these interactive experiences. It’s embarrassing to say, but I think like a lot of companies, most of the hard lessons we’ve learned could have been picked up in the first class of Marketing 101. First and foremost: Listen to your users! We hire a lot of great product designers here at LiveHive, but more often than not, the great ideas come out of our user community. That’s the nice part about having a product that people love - your community of users is always wanting to help contribute to making the product even better. tvClickr is a perfect example of users getting involved in product development. We were hearing for months from users who wanted a much wider range of programming, they wanted it every night, and wanted it to tap into their existing social networks. Eventually we figured out that our user community was right, and we created tvClickr.

6.  Broadcasters seem to be experimenting with a number of digital/interactive technology solutions these days, what are some of the best practices you’ve developed in working with your broadcaster clients?

There are so many products online nowadays competing for a user’s attention… And we always want to get more than our fair share of that attention. So a lot of our best practices are focused on how to effectively target the best candidates for a particular offering, how to let them know about it, and then how to keep them engaged beyond that first visit. This targeting is something we’ve realized isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and we’ve developed a set of tailored campaigns that have been really effective at keeping our community engaged over what may be many months that an offering runs with a broadcaster.

7.  Why do you think these broadcasting giants are turning to companies like LiveHive for new product offerings? Why are they not just building/deploying the products in-house?

There are a lot of moving parts in creating a synchronized interactive offering for TV broadcasts… There are really technical aspects to keep the content synchronized and timely, marketing aspects to build in the right viral mechanisms, and actual content creation challenges to match a show’s demographic to a particular mix of interactivity. Quite often, broadcasters have tried to pull together something like this on their own and the results have been pretty mediocre. Creating an interactive offering is quite different from creating TV content. Broadcasters are coming to us because they’ve witnessed our ability to pull together these complex projects, and they’re excited to leverage our expertise as part of their overall offering to viewers.

8.  What opportunities do you see on the horizon for LiveHive?

Digital media is an amazing environment to be working in right now… The landscape has changed more in the past 12 months than it has in the previous 12 years which has created an incredible number of opportunities and challenges that need to be solved. The opportunities that are most exciting to us revolve around changes on the distribution and consumption side of things.

People are more in love with media than ever, but they’re accessing it on different devices and in different ways than we were five years ago. The center of LiveHive’s mission is to make this media content more interactive, social, and ultimately more valuable. As more media viewing moves online, or onto devices like iPhones and X-Boxes, that mission doesn’t change, but the ways to make that content interactive most definitely do change. We’re spending a lot of time with our clients right now thinking about these issues. It’s a pretty exciting intersection to be at.

9.  What are some of the key hurdles you still need to overcome?

Over the past couple of years, we’ve spent more time than anyone else out there figuring out how to make TV content interactive and more social. We’ve really done a great job with sports, reality tv, and award shows - and we have the repeat business to prove it. But this type of programming is just a fraction of the content that’s on TV, and we instinctively know that viewers have the same passion and desire to socialize around other shows they’re watching, whether it’s late night TV, a primetime drama, or an afternoon soap opera. We’re still working on developing entertaining and compelling interactive elements for these show categories.

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