Twitter’s taking on the world of real-time television by acquiring two leading European startups.
London-based company SecondSync and Parisian company Mesagraph have been snapped up in a bid to tap into our favourite pastime – doing nothing on a sofa while staring at the box.
Both startups produce analytics on how people engage with television, which is then sold onto advertisers and broadcasters. They’ll now be based out of Twitter’s London offices.
In an announcement on their homepage, SecondSync explained:
Twitter is the only place that hosts a real-time, public conversation about TV at scale. By joining Twitter, we will be able to help take that experience, in concert with the rest of the TV ecosystem, to the next level.
Twitter is the only place that hosts a real-time, public conversation about TV at scale. By joining Twitter, we will be able to help take that experience, in concert with the rest of the TV ecosystem, to the next level.Twitter TV going global
It follows Twitter’s announcement on Monday that it will be bringing “Twitter TV measurement to even more regions of the world” through a tie up with Kantar Media.
In the US, they already partnered with Nielsen to launch the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating(NTTR), which bolts onto the existing Nielsen TV ratings.
In a statement, Twitter said:
These initiatives reflect the strength of our commitment to the social TV market
The bird is the word in London
This isn’t the first time Twitter’s splashed out on a Silicon Roundabout company. In 2011, they snapped snapped up Tweetdeck for $40m from Ian Dodsworth.
It was one of the first big startup success stories to come out of the area and was seen as one of the first indicators that London was capable of producing world-class internet startups after the dot com bubble.