The Shazam cinema is called Touchvie

Who has not spent dead hours on the internet because one history brings you to another? The interactive experience of the network has no limits, while television has many years that it is among us and many technological changes it experienced has not yet been achieved to achieve its level because “it is not bidirectional”. “With television we have become passive consumers of entertainment who offer us, but we cannot go further,” explains Jose Luis Florez, CEO and founder of the Asturian company Touchvie.

The company, winner of the TIE50 Silicon Valley Award for the best technological startup in the Artificial Intelligence category, has created an application that eliminates this lack of interaction between consumers and television. Users who download it to their mobile or tablet (available for free for Android and iOS) can discover information about the characters, scenarios, costumes, restaurants, accessories, etc. of the film or series that they view.

And this directness is the truly distinctive point of touchvie, because the information automatically appears when the app detects at what time you find the film. At that time, the user has access to this data or later read them as additional information. “We have the technological capacity to do something that nobody else is doing in the world now,” says Florez.

Currently there are companies that provide additional information, but not at Touchvie level. This is the case of IMBD, where we can find data from films and actors, but very static and of course not at the same time viewing. Amazon also has a service in the United States that at the same time provides information, but only from the actors. “There are companies that specialize in a field, such as in fashion or in the appearance of the characters, but that information is much more limited than what we offer,” says the CEO of Touchvie.

The app was released in November 2015 and today has more than 100,000 downloads in Spain, but the expectations are “millions of users next year” thanks to alliances with television chains, aggregators and television manufacturers and decoders. The goal is that additional information can be seen directly on television using the remote control to choose which aspect we want to know more.

Although they already have 1500 titles with interactive content, the idea of ​​the company is to end the year with more than 3,000 and have around 5,000 in 2017. “They are figures that are comparable to those of Netflix in the US,” says Florez. These are the films with more audience, recent and classical cinema. In the case of the series, the most popular as ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘House of Cards’, ‘Big Bang Theory’ and ‘True Detective’ are already in the Touchvie catalog.

How does it work?

The process for a user is to download the app and to communicate with the content of different forms. “If you place a DVD, the app detects what time in the film you are and start sending information. If you watch a television film, we have servers who record it and identify the image,” Florez explains. The user may only give the ‘receive information’ button to read related data while watching the film.

But how do you get the app all that information? “Through systems that record the image. For example, they look for the listings of objects that appear in the series, which have decoded, cleaning information and we give context.” From that part the Asturias team, in whose office the professionals are in the humanities, such as art, geography, fashion, design, history … “so that the content we contribute to the algorithm is of higher quality.” On the other hand, they have the office in Madrid, where employees specialize in artificial data and intelligence. They also have offices in Munich and New York. In total there are 65 employees worldwide.

After this the question arises: how is it possible to grow so much in less than a year? “Work hard and with sufficient financing,” says Florez. The company has remained so far with its own financing, “from nearby people and the founders”, but internationalization ensures that the process accelerates and more resources are needed.

Tie50 Silicon Valley

Touchvie has been the winner of the best ‘startup’ price of the year in the artificial intelligence category at the TY50 Awards of Silicon Valley, a “very important” recognition because it is “the industry itself that you have a unique project,” says the CEO proudly. Similarly, the price has a major impact on media level, with the resulting advertisements that this generates for the company and the greatest convenience of the search for external financing.

The process until he became winners was complex. Touchvie came out in the American publication ‘Bloomberg’, which gave them a great impact on the land, and that is why the Ticom organizers called them to apply. “They receive more than 2,000 candidates from all over the world and select the 100 finalists. In that great screen we were the only Europeans who survived,” says Florez. The jury then selects 50 ‘startups’ that ‘stand out for something’. In their case, they were awarded for their innovative project worldwide in terms of artificial intelligence.