SAN FRANCISCO — At the Smart TV and Multi-screen Advertising Summit in San Francisco, J.P. Lee, Executive VP of Enswers, the leading provider of automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies and systems, announced that the company signed a deal with Samsung in May, making them the exclusive ACR vendor for Samsung Smart TV in North America.
Lee told Beet.TV contributor Ashley Swartz more about the deal, saying, "We provide our video fingerprinting technology-based ACR on the hardware level, which means people who sign deals with Samsung get to have access to our API and they’re able to build ACR-based applications." The partnership with Samsung follows the $40 million acquisition of Enswers by Korea Telecom (KT) in December 2011.
In addition to announcing the partnership, Lee also speaks about the future of second screen technology in the video interview. He explains that currently, in the United States, third-party companies like Shazam and IntoNow are trying to lead the second screen market. "But what I found in Korea is a lot of the content providers, especially the broadcasting stations, want to have their own app,” he says. “At the end of the day, I think it’s going to be the content providers who are going to be leading the market, because they’re the ones who are creating the value."
Enswers has been working with a number of broadcasting stations in Korea, who are using the company’s ACR technology to build their own second screen apps, and Lee believes that we will see a similar trend in the United States. Big content providers like NBC or Disney will want to have their own second screen apps instead of working with third-party companies and splitting revenue. "So our goal here is to basically provide a better technology at a cheaper price so all these content providers can have their own branded app."
