Fabrizio Capobianco thinks baseball is “the perfect social sport. It is long, it is daily and it is 10 times better if enjoyed with friends.”

So Capobianco, a social entrepreneur, founded TOK Baseball an iPhone and iPad app that lets sports fans connect and chat with other fans about a game from the comfort of their living room through this second-screen platform. The primary reason, after all, to attend a ballgame at the stadium (as opposed to say, watching it at home with a beer that doesn’t cost $12) is for the social experience. To feel the energy of the crowd, to yell at the umpire with your fellow fans, to root and holler and talk stats with a community of like-minded fans. TOK Baseball users can do all that, from their living room couch.

TOK.tv, which also has a football app and an Oscars app, ultimately seeks to be a second-screen companion to, according to Capobianco, “any event in which you would pick up the phone, call a friend and say ‘did you see THAT?’ But it seems most ideally suited to baseball, a game of minute details, endless statistics, and fans who love to dissect them all at length.

TOK Baseball supplements the live chat experience by integrating a running stream of player and team stats, news, and insights before, during and after games. Users even get to see a graphic summary of what is happening on the field, if, for some reason, the televised game it’s meant to be paired with isn’t working properly.

Setting itself further from other verbal chat engines, the TOK team is working on “removing the sound of your TV from the conversation with your friends,” said Capobianco. Other chat tools, such as Skype, “will pick up the volume of your TV and broadcast it to your friends. They hear it as echo from their TV, which is quite annoying.”

TOK users can currently invite up to three friends to join the baseball conversation. The service has no technical numerical limit, according to Capobianco, but the cutoff point exists because “we have done several tests and we have concluded that four is the maximum to have a great conversation. Too many people speaking at the same time, and it is just a brawl.”

TOK.tv is currently funded by investor dollars, but because it’s tied into the increasingly rare live television experience, it ultimately hopes to partner with advertisers seeking to maximize the reach of their TV commercials. With up to four viewers connected and talking during a commercial break, the opportunities to achieve that goal seem plentiful in the hands of an imaginative marketer.

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