Shopping App Uses Audio Sync For Real-Time Purchases From TV Shows
E-commerce and the iPad have enabled a service that allows TV viewers to shop for products they see on a TV program, said Lisa Farris, CEO of Get*This, which launched an iPad app this month that enables second-screen shopping while a user is watching the ABC drama Scandal. Scandal is the first show to incorporate SmartSync media synchronization technology from Audible Magic, in which the audio signal is matched to an annotated reference set of signatures so the app stays in time with the story line. An app for the iPhone is next up and others will follow, Farris told Consumer Electronics Daily.
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"People have been talking about doing this since Friends but no one has been able to pull it off,” said Farris, who said she tested the concept in 2001 with music videos streaming from a set-top box when she was senior vice president-market development for Universal Music’s eLab division. Companies have been selling caps and t-shirts from shows “but nothing that shows the style of what you're seeing on TV,” she said.
A decade ago, “the technology wasn’t ready,” Farris said. Women and men were interested in the concept but in focus groups “they'd ask how to use the remote control,” she said. “Most people don’t know the difference between ‘menu’ and ‘guide,'” she said, and “there’s no ‘buy’ button on a remote control.” A large percentage of people who own tablets use them in a second-screen scenario while watching TV, she said, “and you don’t have to teach them how to use that remote control. They know how to use it."
The other stumbling block to program-related real-time shopping was inventory, Farris said. Ten years ago, “you'd have to carry inventory and it would be insurmountable to carry all that inventory for every show every week,” she said. Today, lots of brands have their own direct fulfillment e-commerce businesses and can handle the inventory aspect of the model on their end, she said. Another feature of the Get*This app is that viewers can shop products from several designers using a single-cart checkout process, she said. “If all we did was tell people where to find a product, 79 percent will never go to the second item,” she said. “They don’t want to go to multiple carts.”
Consumers can shop several ways through Get*This. They can read articles on the website with style tips from costume designers, makeup hair artists, set designers and others in the TV industry. They can shop by episode or shop in real time along with the program. When a scene changes, products change. The first Scandal show had roughly 80 products related to the show, Farris said. Get*This handles orders, payment and product return logistics, she said.
Get*This acts as a “super affiliate” and takes a percentage on every sale, Farris said. Although the site started in the same way a flash site would start, Get*This doesn’t plan to offer highly discounted flash sales but to instead “preserve value,” she said. There won’t be a time window attached to shopping, she said. Items from Scandal include men’s and women’s clothing and accessories. Future categories will include sports apparel and home goods, Farris said. A Get*This merchandising team reviews shows and curates items that will be sold through the site. The company has roughly 75 brand partners and one e-commerce partner, Singer 22, Farris said.
Farris hopes to have a dozen shows set up for synched shopping by year-end, she said. She envisions daytime talk shows with celebrities where “you can shop everything you see,” she said. Synching with commercials is a next logical step, she said. For products like cars that wouldn’t be shopped from a tablet, the platform could be used for marketing purposes. A consumer could request literature through second-screen shopping she said. Get*This has a patent pending on “personalized shopping,” with its content management and order management systems, she said.
In our brief review of the app, we were impressed by the audio synching technology in real time. Products scrolled across the “main stage” of the website when a character wore them in a scene. That suffered, though, when using with a DVR. Fast-forwarding threw off the app and we had to re-synch, a process that took at least 30 seconds. Some of the items seemed to be exact replicas of the clothes Scandal characters were wearing but others were similar at best, and it wasn’t clear which was which. An all-weather London Fog coat with a slick surface that was featured on the app was nothing like a dark green wool coat a character wore in the show and seemed to defeat the purpose of the app.
Farris said the site sells items based on a variety of criteria including whether the original product is still available. A Get*This stylist might choose a product from a similar brand or price point. Cost is an issue because in the case of Scandal, character Olivia Pope wears $5,000 suits which wouldn’t be affordable for the audience so stylists might look for a more affordable alternative. Through a survey of 1,200 women, Get*This determined the top 75 TV shows women wanted to watch and product categories they wanted to shop, she said.