Matt Millar, CEO of the London-based app company Tellybug, rose to prominence in the TV tech space at Adobe, heading up the company’s Mobile & Device division in EMEA. While working on making connected TVs more interactive, a light bulb moment occurred: It wasn’t the TVs that needed to be connected, but the TV viewers.

In 2009, Millar founded Tellybug, a startup dedicated to increasing interactivity with the TV shows themselves through amazing second-screen experiences. Their first major client, “Britain’s Got Talent,” didn’t have a budget for an app, so Tellybug offered to make it for free. Today, the company calls some of the biggest series in Europe its clients, including “The X Factor” and “The Voice UK.” Its “X Factor” app, along with its now-iconic “tap-to-clap” feature, saw its user quantity grow to more than 1.5 million-per-episode within 20 weeks of its launch in 2011.

Brief caught up with Millar in his London office to hear about what makes a great TV app, why second-screen is the new advertising medium, and why the first screen will remain TV’s primary output device for at least the next 20 years.

BRIEF: It’s amazing to think that as recently as four years ago, a massive TV production like “Britain’s Got Talent” didn’t have a budget for a second-screen experience.
MATT MILLAR: If you’re a TV production company, there’s nothing out there that helps you do that stuff. If you’re aspiring to be the best in the world at doing digital and web, why on earth do you end up at a broadcaster? [Laughs.] There are many better places to go. The ambition of people in broadcast tends to be broadcast-related, rather than digital. They know an awful lot about creating really good mass media, but not about building the kind of scale of tech that we do.

Tellybug’s slogan is, “Simply the best TV apps. Ever.” Are there any general rules for what makes a great TV app?
The analogy we use is, if you go into a restaurant and order a burger and fries – if they just gave you the fries, you’d be pretty upset. The best executions on the second screen are the fries. The TV show is the burger. If you’re going to create a great game, create it online. You don’t need the TV. If you’re doing second screen, you’ve got to get those two [experiences] working in harmony, so that they’re better together.

There are some really easy ones. A quiz show: Who’s watched a quiz show and not gone, “I can answer those questions and be better than the guys on the TV.” A well-designed second-screen format with quiz will balance the time that you’re looking at the device, answering the questions trying to beat them on the TV, and some time to sit back and relax and enjoy the [show]. It’s getting that balance – not too little while the TV’s on, not too much to do.

ITV recently stated publicly that second-screen advertising is the “new advertising medium” based on the success of advertising campaigns that ran on Tellybug’s “X Factor” app. What would you say accounted for this success?
We’ve worked with ITV on a platform technology called AdSync, that [serves] an ad into your phone at the same time as an ad on the TV. What we’ve discovered is, if you get people playing along on a second screen during a TV show – you switch to an ad break [and] you serve them an ad, [and] if that ad is entertaining, the numbers go through the roof. We’ve had some fantastic successes. We’ve seen 50% engagement rates, and we’re still only penetrating a fraction of the TV audience. So as we continue to work with the brands and the program makers to up the level of engagement, improve the integration into the shows, [and] to make it a more compelling and a better experience, we’ve got numbers that serve directly actionable digital advertising 100 times better than web ads. That’s the sort of things that TV should be doing.

You’ve worked on connected TVs and you’ve worked on second-screen TV experiences. Where do you see all this going in 20 years? Will connected TVs’ interactivity ever become sophisticated enough to eliminate the need for second screens?
The view I have on this is that the TV screen, that big screen, will remain the best output device in the home for the next 20 years, and at the same time will remain the worst input device. You can stick Kinect on it and make it really clever at input and voice recognition, and it’s still screwed when there’re two people in the room shouting different things at [it]. From an input device and a participation device, the phone and the tablet are going to simply get stronger and stronger. That output device can get bigger and better and more immersive, but it’s still going to be that theater-like experience. Is your phone the input device? Absolutely. TV the output? Absolutely. Trying to combine the two? I think you end up with less than the sum of the parts. I actually think you keep them separate. Because the ergonomics are different.

And it seems as though as long as event-oriented programming continues to be broadcast’s most valuable commodity, the home-theater experience will only get bigger and better to ensure those events are as impressive onscreen as possible.
The smart TV producers that are working with broadcasters see the Amazons and the Netflixes coming at them on the drama side, [and] are realizing they need to invest in creating really great live event content. They have a huge structural technology advantage in delivering mass audiences all at the same time. And that’s what their audience with broadcast is. That’s why sport is so valuable, and that’s why the really big successful global formats have all been like that: the “Voices,” the “X Factors.” Those that have become big global formats have had that event behavior, and that’s where we see things going… the kind of Super Bowl moments. Crafting those, getting those right… the guys who are going to win are going to be the guys who can pull that all together, create that real moment in front of the TV.

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