Thats Interesting

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If You Heard It On TV, It’s Heardontv Too!

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One of the scenes I will never forget is from a German comedy show, where a whole street stops to try and figure out a tune. But now with Heardontv.com, those days are well in the past. Register on the site, track your TV show, song and artist, and link to that episode and season. For the die-hard music fan, the site also has links to search on iTunes, Rhapsody, or Amazon. To spread the word, you can ‘digg’ it or submit a song or leave comments. You can buy the tune and if it’s free, the good folks actually provide a link from where you can download it.

You can follow your specific shows through the feed formula, better still, you can pick the brains of fellow members, by uploading sound clips and asking for help in identifying them. It’s all about the music. The submission side is equally interesting. Contributors can go to TV episodes to submit songs. The more songs you submit, you and your show race to the top of the charts.

Techmambo’s short and sweet summary:

heardontv.com gets its content from its users, users submit songs heard in their favorite tv shows, submissions get moderated and appear on the site.

And killerstartups tells us why it could be a killer:

People are constantly looking for the music they heard on TV, and this makes it a lot easier to find out that information and get direct links as to where you can download it to enjoy it again. A lot of people are helping to contribute songs to the site so that the list of what’s being played on TV is actually accurate and informative.

What We Heard From Them – A Chat

What is the inspiration behind Heard On TV?

It started after watching one episode of “Lost� back in October. Somewhere during the first 5 minutes, a song hit my ears. I went online after the show, looked at the Lost forum and found the song title and artist, Downtown by Petula Clark.

I was not the only one looking for that tune this day, and not only for Lost, looking at other tv show forums, you find questions like "what was that song?", "I know this song", and very often you find the answers, some people are very good when it comes to recognizing a particular song they heard on tv :)

heardontv.com was born some days after; a place where tv show fans can share their finding on the songs they hear in their favorite shows, and a place for the casual viewer to browse the large amount of music tunes used by the networks in their shows.

What type of programming is Heard On TV built on?

Heardontv is built on Ruby On Rails. RoR made it possible to have a working site very quickly, it took us no more than 3 weeks to have the site ready to roll. I'd like to thank the folks at hostingrails.com for the (very) reliable and affordable hosting.

Grey’s Anatomy seems to be very popular source of songs. What are some other shows that generate traffic to your site?

Grey's Anatomy is a very prolific source for songs. Nip/Tuck, the CSI series (and Alias at its time), Veronica Mars are good providers. Ugly Betty has been a winner too this year.

Where do you see web 2.0 sites going in the next two to three years?

Web 2.0 is all about user generated content, about aggregation, mashups and so. We already see the future happening, web 2.0 startups are being acquired every week, with a huge deal every other month, the big players - google, yahoo, microsoft - are buying the user generated content, for the greater good, no I don't think so, to place more advertisement instead. Web 2.0 mobile should be one of the next big thing, unlimited data plans are coming from the mobile operators, phones are getting (really) smarter and more accessible. Web 2.0 has to move out of the PC.

One thing I'd like to see in all these web 2.0 sites is single-sign-on. Lot of web 2.0 websites emerge every day, some are very cool but they always require you to register before you can use them. Come on, this has to stop! I have a Yahoo account, a Google account, an AIM account, an OpenID, and they all offer some authentication API, just integrate with them so I can log in without the need to go through your registration page - I don't give you my real name anyway...

How do you use your blog to market Heard On TV?

On the blog we feature one artist whose songs have been featured in a tv episode recently (or will be soon). We look for videos on YouTube, for iTunes links and we put everything together in "the focus". This week we introduced guest blogging, PJ Olsson is the first artist we have invited on our blog, others will follow. The blog also holds development tips about the site.

I am a big TV fan in general. How important are the users to your site?

There are users :) I won't disclose any numbers but there are regular and casual users. One feature which we wanted to have was the anonymous contribution feature. If you just happen to hit the website after a google search and just want to leave a comment to ask a question or to submit a song, well you don't to register. This makes it a bit harder to count the active users but it gives a lot of freedom to contributors. No need to register to participate. However registering grants access to additional features like rating, bookmarking, uploading song clips, using a widget on your blog, submitting related links. We have plans to give back to the contributors in the upcoming weeks.

Do you find that activity and traffic are seasonal along with the tv shows (ie sweeps & season finales)?

Traffic is almost constant during the year. It is more important between October-November to May than during the rest of the year, mainly because of the Summer break but there are still some Summer tv shows around or repeats to maintain a good load on the site :) What is very exciting is when people are battling to find the title of a song and no one is figuring it out until there is one who finds it right. Sometimes it gets crazy - it happens several times this year, among others with Unkle Bob in Grey's Anatomy (http://heardontv.com/tvshow/Grey%27s+Anatomy/Season+3/Some+Kind+of+Miracle) and with Jonathan Czerwik in Bones (http://heardontv.com/tvshow/Bones/Season+2/The+Man+in+the+Mansion).

What are users looking for or sharing more of songs within a TV episode or theme songs?

Songs within a TV episode definitely. The theme song for a tv show gets filled very quickly when a tv show is added to the site. Then it's all about the episodes. People also comment on the site, either to ask about a song or also to share their findings on when a song can be (legally) downloaded or heard.

Let’s Hear It For Heardontv!

Despite music sites being a dime a dozen, Heardontv scores simply by identifying a need and addressing it very, very well. The possibilities of marketing to both the music and the tv industry are huge. It’s the perfect platform to create that life giving ‘buzz’ to both TV shows and upcoming artists. We are quite sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from this site.

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 01:35AM Jul 10, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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