Members of a Syracuse-based development team debuted the beta version of their startup Friday, using the feedback from other startup teams and local businesses to improve their product for a startup competition at South by Southwest in March.

Nomi Foster, a 2013 graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications’ master’s program in New Media Management, formed the idea of PlatypusTV when she was an undergraduate student. PlatypusTV is a platform that compiles audience’s commentary as they watch, preserving the show’s shelf life and providing opportunities for advertisers to interact with a more specific consumer audience.

“We’re collecting and curating comment streams,” said Sarah Roche, another graduate of the New Media Management program. “No matter when you watch there will always be a comment stream around the show.”

Foster, Roche and Connor Vanderpool, a Syracuse native and game design development major at the Rochester Institute of Technology, debuted PlatypusTV’s beta at the Tech Garden for Beta Night. The team will use the critical feedback to improve its product for the final round of Student Startup Madness, an NCAA basketball-style tournament that’s part of the annual SXSW festival — a music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

During Beta Night, 10 development teams, including PlatypusTV, pitched and ran their products in order to receive feedback from other participants.

Roche said Foster approached her to join the team after she began interviewing candidates for technology support.
“I was waiting it out to see if she was serious. I thought it was a great idea but wanted to see if it would be executed,” Roche said. “When she started doing interviews, I took over and was officially on board.”

In May 2012, Roche, Foster and Sean Branagan, the director for the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, traveled to RIT, where they found Vanderpool. After he built a prototype, Foster and Roche offered Vanderpool an official position and he became the startup’s third co-founder.

“They were really looking for another founder. You obviously had to have the technical skills, but they were also looking for someone they got along with personality-wise,” Vanderpool said.

The concept of PlatypusTV originated when Foster saw the ineffectiveness of Nielsen ratings, which failed at measuring viewership in a changing media landscape. She wanted to allow viewers to experience the hype of their favorite shows whether they watched them in real time or later on platforms like Netflix.

Since the culmination of Foster’s idea, she, Roche and Vanderpool have attended multiple digital startup events like the Raymond von Dran IDEA Awards, the NASA Space Apps Challenge and EmergingTalk. At RvD, Foster pitched PlatypusTV to venture capitalists from Silicon Valley who she said tore the idea apart.

For Foster, facing criticism is the biggest challenge.

“Platypus is Nomi’s baby, so she takes the criticism the worst,” Roche said. “That’s why I’ve taken over pitching and she watches from the audience.”

Intellectual property protection issues and the uncertainty of the startup world also challenge the group. Roche said it can be stressful to turn away from a normal, more stable career path.

But so far, PlatypusTV has been positively received — at Beta Night, the concept and direction of PlatypusTV was well received by the audience, Foster said. Participants also discussed features they’d like to see on the platform, which the team said they will work on adding before SXSW.

“Our next step is to build user profiles and make it more shareable with social media login options. Then we plan to focus on bringing on users,” Roche said.

With feedback from Beta Night, the team can prepare further for SXSW, she said. In a month’s time, they hope to finish the mobile version of PlatypusTV and debut it at the festival.

Eventually, Roche and Foster want PlatypusTV to become a go-to video-curating application and the successor of the Nielsen rating system.

Until then, the group said it will continue to network, brainstorm new ideas and “eat, sleep and breathe” PlatypusTV.

Published on February 3, 2014 at 12:56 am