The verbiage surrounding social TV app development tool Watchwith, in its own company communications and elsewhere, contains no small amount of technical jargon: “cloud platform for building synchronous experiences”; “time-based metadata”; “sync-to-broadcast content management”; and the list goes on.

But what Watchwith does at its essence is something anyone in the TV business can understand: “"We’re creating a world where every frame of TV is rich in possibilities,” company CEO and co-founder Zane Vella recently told Ad Age. And he means that quite literally. At June’s Social TV Summit in Los Angeles, Vella presented how content owners engage with the Watchwith platform to a room full of network executives, projecting the Watchwith showrunner app, a timeline-based interface that resembles editing software such as Final Cut Pro. But what the user splices in is not footage, but second-by-second social media data points that can be customized for and scheduled to run on any social platform in sync with any given frame of any given episode’s broadcast.

Frame by frame, second by second, scene by scene, Watchwith lets content owners create what it calls “Time Data,” including actors/portrayals, music, products and locations and custom events like quizzes, or character backstory to add depth and engagement to content. For instance, using Watchwith, USA was able to extend more than 40 pieces of content into second screen apps during the broadcast of its 100th episode of “Psych” back in April, including trivia, polls and editorial commentary. Naturally, this functionality enhances and makes more efficient engagement with viewers far beyond a show’s broadcast window, but it is also offers, ultimately, a kind of syndication of second-screen experiences, letting networks extend social content beyond their own channel-based apps (which only account for 10% of all second screen TV app downloads) and onto more all-consuming apps such as zeebox, Shazam and Viggle. It’s potentially a boom for advertisers as well, who get vastly improved reach for their buck.

Watchwith, which started as the much less exciting-sounding Related Content Database in 2006, has reeled in some of its biggest clients yet in 2013, including NBCUniversal and Fox Broadcasting, and investors are taking note. In June, Canada’s Rogers Venture Partner led a $5 million series A investment in the company. The money will help “to further develop its

broadcaster and advertiser tools, expand its customer base, and extend the reach of the Watchwith syndication network to cable, satellite, telco and connected TV partners,” the company said in a statement.

Brief Take: The problem of profiting off of second screen content is an ongoing one, but Watchwith seems to at least hint at a solution with its syndication model. According to Zane Vella, “Syndication equals scale for advertisers.”

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