INTRODUCING TOUCHCAST: VIDEO WITH THE SECOND SCREEN BUILT IN
The internet is increasingly being consumed on devices with touchscreens, and ever more of it is being experienced in the form of video. But those two trends haven’t really fit together comfortably. Compared to a typical webpage, with its dozens of clickable links and widgets, the average video might as well be trapped behind Plexiglass.
That’s the problem that the cofounders of TouchCast — Charley Miller, Erick Schonfeld and Edo Segal — set out to solve. The new iPad app they rolled out today allows users to create videos with built-in interactive components like web pages, maps and Twitter streams.
Say you’re watching a news segment about Microsoft MSFT -0.39% with an embedded stock chart, and you’re wondering how its shares have been performing versus Apple AAPL -0.37%‘s. You can look it up while the segment plays on in the background.
The app enables users — including FORBES — to create their own interactive TouchCasts with the help of 16 different types of video apps, or vApps. In addition to the types mentioned above, these include apps for comments, photos, headlines and YouTube videos.
“Historically we’ve always thought of lean back and lean forward,” says Segal, who earlier founded the search company Relegance and sold it to AOL AOL +1.3% in 2006. “There’s a new category and we’re calling it ‘lean back and touch.’”.
That locates TouchCast at the center of one of the big movements in media: the push to harness the power of the so-called second screen — what TV viewers are doing on their laptops, phones and tablets while they watch.
“We think the second screen is an intermediary step,” says Schonfeld.
To give you a better idea of how it works, we TouchCasted this video of our editor in chief, Randall Lane, talking about the new edition of the FORBES Celebrity 100. View it on an iPad to get the full experience.