At one point last night, while watching the newest episode of The Leftovers, I blurted to my wife, “How much you want to bet John Murphy busts into the trailer before the old guy can bring Kevin back to life?”

For those who haven’t seen the show, the particulars involved with that statement aren’t important – what matters is that my wife didn’t want to bet with me (which was good because my prediction, as most of them are involving HBO’s wildly unpredictable drama, wound up being wildly wrong) and that the urge to try and guess what would happen next was strong in me, as it is in most of us.

The new app Plot Guru taps into that universal impulse with a second-screen trivia experience that syncs with Netflix’s streaming content, asking the viewer questions in real time about what’s going to happen next. Users simply log on (Plot Guru is currently only available for iOS), select the show and episode they want to play along to, and press play on both Netflix and Plot Guru. Friends can be added so everyone can play together from wherever they are.

Plot Guru’s founder, Justin Key, hatched the idea for the app while working as a strategy consultant in Switzerland, where he and his wife would binge-watch shows with friends and debate what would happen next. He eventually turned their activity into a kind of contest, replete with scorecards. Upon moving to Austin to pursue his MBA, Key realized “that it could be more than just a fun game you could play with your friends. There is actually a pretty large market need for a second-screen product that engages television fans.”

After the idea won him the local Texas Venture Labs Scholarship Competition, Key began developing Plot Guru into a full-blown business. Though he hopes to one day expand to Hulu, Amazon Prime and beyond, he started by syncing the trivia game to Netflix because it is currently the biggest of all the streaming services, and also because it “doesn’t have advertisements or commercials or integrated marketing anywhere on its platform,” he said. “We wanted to explore how a second-screen application linked to a service like Netflix could create monetization opportunities for networks, content producers, brands, marketers, etc., but doing so in a way that wouldn’t be intrusive to the viewer and would add value to people using the app.”

One of those money-making opportunities involves leveraging the data that can be culled from a second-screen app that viewers play along with in real time. “Just by having our users on Plot Guru and engaging with the content we push to their mobile devices while they watch TV, we can learn a lot about what they’re watching, when they’re watching, who they are as a viewer, what they’re most interested in interacting with, and what parts of the show they’re really curious about,” Key said. “I think there’s a lot of value there, not only to the streaming service pushing out the content but also for the content producers themselves and how they design shows, how they develop content and how they want to make it as engaging as possible for viewers.

Key also cited native advertising and sponsored promotions as a way brands could partner with Plot Guru and financially benefit both sides of the equation. This would involve “questions or trivia content built into our game that’s related to a product that the user might see in the show or related to some sort of affiliated marketing campaign,” he said. One example Key likes to give in this regard is that of a clothing item that appears on a show – say, a fancy suit Don Draper wears on Mad Men. “We could have a question like, ‘hey, what brand is that?’ and if the viewer gets it right they get a coupon to go shop at that store or go buy that clothing item, he said. “That’s a way you can build marketing into the game but in a way where the viewer doesn’t feel like they’re being marketed to or pandered to.”

Key’s goal is to keep the app’s basic game play free for users, but his team is working on freemium-type features such as digital currency, badges and prizes that increase when one shares content with friends, or upon completion of a certain amount of shows. True TV trivia diehards will also have the opportunity to pay real money to host their own custom Plot Guru game, writing their own questions and syncing them to a chosen episode. “We’ve had some initial trial versions of that offline where people have even created drinking games with their friends,” said Key.

It’s all part of what Key ultimately hopes will be the chance to “work directly with Netflix or any of the other networks or streaming services and more closely integrate our gaming platform with their content delivery,” he said. “The long-term goal is to be able to work more closely with the content producers to create fully interactive content where the show can actually be built to have a game played along with it or have a trivia service come along with it. It’s something we’ve seen networks experiment with before but nobody’s really done it in a way that’s stuck.”

For now, though, Key is simply focused on making sure “we build a really engaging product before we start expanding too rapidly. Once we feel like we’ve got a really awesome user experience on Netflix and we can’t make that any better, then we’ll start expanding after that.”

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