The New York Times recently wrote about the increasing importance of social networking for TV programmers, the gist being that TV show runners are thinking about social media integration from the inception of the project.
That’s smart thinking in an environment in which social networking has become the fastest-growing mobile content category in the U.S. the numbers are staggering: as of December 2010, nearly 58 million mobile subscribers now use their mobile devices to log on to a social networking site at least monthly. According to analytics firm comScore, that number is up 56 percent from 2010. Smartphone users in the U.S. are even more likely to visit social networking sites, said the report; 57.3 percent of them visit social networking sites at least once monthly, a 11.2 percent rise over 2010. By the way, that percentage equals 36.2 million smartphone owners.The huge uptick in the category is primarily driven by Facebook, with a 121 percent rise since the previous year, accounting for 44 million visitors. (In case you’re curious, the second strongest mobile content growth category was classified, up 55 percent over the previous year, and online retail sites, up 53 percent).
Since social networking is obviously a significant force on mobile (and online), creative and entrepreneurial people are coming up with ways to leverage it with regard to content. The massive number of viewers/users and the overwhelming amount of content at their fingertips is both the promise and the peril of doing business in a digital world. Discoverability–how people find specific content in a sea of competing content–becomes crucial to doing business.
MobilizedTV met with Trevor Stout, CEO and Shawn Cunningham, CMO of yap.tv, a start-up that has created an ecosystem for 
finding and viewing content with a nifty integration of social networking and Facebook.
“Yap is a platform for interactive TV, and a program guide that fuses traditional TV with social media,” explains Stout. “Sixty percent of people multitask with some other device when they watch TV. We’re tying those viewers back into the TV viewing experience without shrinking viewable space on their TV screen.”
Replacing the print TV guide and the mind-numbing grid on a DVR user-interface is a no-brainer. At the same time, creating an easy-to-discover ecosystem for a 900-channel universe is not a simple task. That’s why Yap TV sports a very graphical user interface (think: iconic TV show images) as well as discovery through each person’s own social networking sphere.
“We have a full programming guide,” says Cunningham, “But we’ve reinvented the grid. You can personalize your grid by starting with your favorite content, touching a star to put it on your home screen.”
The social networking piece centers around Facebook. “Discovery has to be personal,” said Stout. “As long as you’re on Facebook, you can see where your friends are at on the show, in real time. We also filter and stream Twitter streams through Yap TV.” That includes the worldwide Twitter streams about a popular TV show. “Under the trending tab in the interface, you see the most being talked about on Twitter and Yap.TV,” said Stout. “By clicking on a show, you can see all the Tweets in real time. It’s a treasure trove of stuff if you’re a fan. On top of that, once you connect your Twitter account, you can reply.”
Bottom line: the social networking universe is huge and completely fragmented; Yap TV provides context and personalizes social networking streams.
If you’re like me and have, 1,000+ Facebook “friends,” there’s also a way to filter through that to your real-life friends. “We anticipated that you might want to be with a more exclusive group,” said Cunningham. “We added a private party feature, which 
is a scalable group chat room. You can create your own private party and invite your friends to a real-time private chat across all iOS devices.”
Other real-time interactive features for what Stout calls “the virtual living room” include user-generated polls and its own social layer for people who may not be on Facebook. “The TV content creates new relationships,” he said. “We see people who haven’t linked their Facebook account, but they might follow each other because they’re both fans of Glee. So it can build its own social network; you have to build a scale effect by being open.”
To make Yap TV extensible–that is, to have the ability to inject new content without releasing new software–the platform is a mix of native (for fast response and GUI) and HTML5. “You can add commerce, widgets, feeds on a show-by-show basis,” Stout says. “You can’t design it inflexibly.”
Right now, Yap TV is a free iOS app for the iPad (launched on September 28) and iPhone/iPod (launched in December). Yap TV is also in alpha on a web version and “is contemplating an Android version.” Also for the future: a “people like you” feature. “You indicate your favorites, your friends come along and show their favorites,” says Cunningham. “It becomes an element that introduces people to new content.”
How will Yap TV monetize its free platform? The range of advertising/marketing opportunities including interactive ads, mobile coupons, loyalty programs and commerce.
Yap TV is a nicely thought-out platform for a crucial pain-point in the digital viewing process. Only time–and viral momentum–will tell if it becomes the discovery platform of the future for TV…but so far, at least, it’s hitting all the right notes.
