Over the last six months we’ve seen the launch of a few products aimed at enhancing the relationship between TV and social. One of the more exciting products to emerge is Grabyo, a TV-clip sharing service aimed squarely at broadcasters. VAN caught up with Will Neale, Managing Director at Grabyo, to find out how the product works and how the early trials went with Sky Sports on transfer deadline day.
Could you give a little background on the company and explain what Grabyo does?
Grabyo helps broadcasters share TV clips in real-time across Twitter, Facebook and their website and apps. We focus on speed, ensuring broadcasters are the first to share their clips, and simplicity. Platforms only achieve scale when they are simple.
We’re an engineering lead team based in Chiswick, West London. We have years of video under our belts and we do all our development in-house, ensuring we can quickly respond to broadcasters’ needs and stay at the forefront of innovation. We take great pride in working with the best, including Sky, Channel 4, The Sun, MSN, Yahoo and many more.
You recently ran trial with Sky Sports on transfer day. How did it go?
It was awesome! Sky generated over 500,000 clip views within the first few hours, all powered by Grabyo. The key was that fans quickly realised that the official Sky platforms (Twitter, Facebook and the Sky Sports site) were the first place to see news clips as they broke – substantially increasing the number of clips viewed. Everyone loved it.
Does Grabyo work best with live TV formats, or could it be used for any type of content?
Grabyo’s real-time nature lends itself particularly well to live formats, but its simplicity also makes it the easiest way for broadcasters to publish clips from pre-recorded formats.
From working closely with the broadcasters we’ve discovered that the primary reason for not sharing more clips on pre-recorded formats is time and money – existing workflows are cumbersome. The digital teams need to get their hands on the DVD, put it through an edit suite for clipping, get the clips into their online video platform, tag the clips up for ad-serving and then share them across social networks at the right time. I’m exhausted just saying that. Inevitable, it rarely happens. With Grabyo the broadcasters’ social media teams can do all of this with a few mouse clicks whilst the show is airing – often from the comfort of their sofa!
How does the monetisation side of things work? Does Twitter get a cut or does the broadcaster retain control?
Unlike many social TV propositions, there’s a great commercial model. Broadcasters earn revenue by selling sponsorship for the clips, as well as post-roll ads – we deliver incremental, high-value video inventory.
Twitter does not take a share of video ads served within Twitter cards, however Grabyo is also a great partner for Twitter Amplify – which Twitter does earn from. Amplify provides broadcasters with increased social reach (funded by sponsors), more ad inventory and revenue for the broadcaster.
Is it possible to measure how many social viewers became linear viewers?
I wish! Correlating linear tune-in with digital campaigns is challenging – it’s something we strongly believe in and an area we’ll be working hard on in the coming months.
See Grabyo Present their Sky Sports Case Study at New Video Frontiers, London October 24th.
