With tens of millions of weekly active users, British startup wants to make second-screen ads a big deal for broadcasters
Shazam says its users are currently tagging 10m songs, shows and ads a day. They're also tapping through to buy the content they tag from download stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3 – to the tune of a run-rate of $300m of sales a year. The vast majority is music, but TV shows, films and apps are a small but fast-growing percentage.
It's that second-screen TV business that holds the key to Shazam's future, though. Starting in the US, which accounts for 90m of those first 300m users of the company's app. Shazam creates content within its app for every programme on 160 American TV channels, serving it up when viewers tag the show.
Content? That's a mixture of episode descriptions, quizzes, tweets, cast information and playable clips of every song on the soundtrack, with links to buy song downloads, TV episodes and merchandise – the latter through a partnership with e-commerce firm Delivery Agent.
For big events like the Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars in the US – and recently the Brit Awards in the UK – Shazam builds what Jones calls "custom experiences", with polls, predictions, and video highlights for 2012's Olympic Games, with official US broadcaster NBC.
