Innovating the Future of TV with the Crowd

Published Apr-25-16

Breakthrough:
Novel Apple TV contest-winning apps could help to change the face of television.

Company:
AppLovin Corporation, United States

The Story:

The popularity of apps is down to a number of factors, such as their utility, low prices and range of software programs on offer. There appears to be an app for just about everything, from monitoring your body's vital signs to studying stars in the night sky. Fueling their development are smart and creative minds that companies and organizations across many different sectors are tapping into to innovate.

Crowdsourcing the Future of TV

The Apple TV App Challenge was a huge global crowdsourcing contest by marketing platform AppLovin to help design and build the future of television. With the organizers believing that TV's future is going to be about apps, the remit was to build the coolest and quirkiest apps possible.

There were two ways that participants could take part: submit an app during the submission period or join the one-day hackathon event. The contest was open to everyone and was a search for completely new apps, not those that had been previously published. Up for grabs were more than $45,000 in prizes.

Benefits of Creating with the Crowd

With the crowd as an innovation partner, companies can harvest brilliant ideas quickly and at low cost. Contests are one of the simplest ways to engage a crowd, and have been used for centuries. They have solved numerous challenges in history, such as developing an aircraft to fly nonstop between New York and Paris and figuring out a way to determine longitude at sea.

Apple TV App Challenge Winners

The crowdsourcing app challenge’s $25,000 first prize was awarded to Takashi Iyoda from Japan for his ‘Dungeon Tiles’, an immersive game. The independent developer said that he enjoyed the challenge of creating a game on the relative big screen, where he could add more features because of more screen space. Others too relished the tasking of turning an iOS game into a tvOS game (the term tvOS refers to a new operating system developed by Apple for its Apple TV digital media player).

From the hackathon part of the crowdsourcing exercise, utility and social apps were prominent with the winners being ‘Runtastica’ and ‘Tune Pop’. The former is an immersive (stationary) running or jogging experience that can detect how fast a person is running on the spot. It can also notify friends of milestones reached. ‘Tune Pop’ is a social media player that features user-collaborated playlists. Both the hackathon winners picked up a cash prize of $5,000.

“We were absolutely blown away by the level of apps we saw,” said John Krystynak, chief technology officer at AppLovin. “If apps truly are the future of TV, these developers will make sure that the future is very bright indeed.”

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