This sponsored post is produced by SPROCKIT.

Last week, NAB Show introduced the first 10 startups participating in SPROCKIT, a year-round startup program now in its second year with more influencers, participants, and visionaries than ever before. The program brings together disruptive startups with industry leaders to collaborate, innovate, and accelerate solutions to problems currently facing the media and entertainment industry.

Today, meet the remaining 17 startups. Each of these companies has introduced technologies that are changing the way people create, manage, monetize, distribute, and consume media and entertainment. With many of these companies working in various stages of the content lifecycle, here is how take each is impacting one area in particular.

Content creation

Media and entertainment no longer begins and ends in a studio. Today, content comes from various sources — from a broadcast network to a consumer’s smartphone. These are a few of the companies fostering this change:

  • Chute helps brands and publishers tell stories using visual media by making it possible to discover, organize, obtain consent, and publish fan photos and videos at every customer touch point, whether on a website or social properties or in ads.
  • SportXast is a free mobile app for sports fans to capture, watch, and share the best video highlights in amateur athletics with zero editing.
  • Paladin Innovators develops software and hardware solutions for streaming and broadcasting, including the Paladin, an all-in-one streaming studio that fits in a backpack.

Content management

Broadcasters, brands, and consumers alike have an incredible number of ways to produce and absorb information and need more informative, secure solutions to help manage the content. In other cases — for broadcasters and advertisers in particular — how can they unlock the data within their platforms to better understand not only who is interested in their programming but how they feel about it and why? Enter the next five startups:

  • CloudFlare, Inc. makes websites run twice as fast, protects them from cyber-attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click.
  • Discourse Analytics humanizes data by uncovering why individuals connect to digital assets which, in turn, help broadcasters better understand and personalize the digital experience for audiences.
  • Eyeris develops artificially intelligent emotion-recognition technology. Its flagship product, EmoVu, reads people’s facial microexpressions as they watch videos on computers or mobile devices using webcams.
  • nFluence‘s consumer-powered marketing is powered by autograph, a personalized cross-device technology that gives people the freedom to securely communicate their interests to broadcasters and advertisers.
  • XYZ Stream Hosting is a cloud-based, turnkey streaming platform for digital media, delivering greater efficiency to content producers, owners, and distributors through state of the art solutions.

Content commerce

NAB Show brings $20.7 billion in buying power into one room. Media and entertainment is no doubt a strong market, but traditional advertising and other business interests have changed along with the rest of the content lifecycle. Below are several companies who are helping brands and broadcasters monetize content and make more informed business decisions:

  • Civolution provides automatic content recognition (ACR) technology and solutions that help advertisers, content owners, rights holders, and distributors identify, manage, and monetize media content.
  • clypd is an advertising platform built exclusively for TV. It connects the buyers and sellers of TV asset inventory, automates the workflow, and leverages data to enable audience-based targeting.
  • FEM Inc. has developed a video-discovery platform embeddable into any website, entertainment network, or app that has or wants video and seeks to engage female audiences.
  • SocialNewsDesk is a social media-management tool created by news-people for news-people, so broadcasters can increase social engagement, manage a team, and monetize social media from a single dashboard.

Content distribution and consumption

Consumers no longer serve as silent spectators during the viewing experience. They have become increasingly engaged in what they watch and seek to become part of the story. These organizations help audiences find the content they want and involve them in the viewing process beyond just displaying visuals on a single screen:

  • iPowow creates participation-TV formats for broadcasters to engage viewers in the story on the TV show, second by second, via their mobile devices while enabling advertisers to connect directly with the consumer.
  • Lingospot enhances TV viewing by providing relevant articles, photos, profiles, stock charts, and other information in second screen and on smart TV applications.
  • net2TV combines streaming technology, advanced advertising capabilities, and programming from major media partners to create free, special-interest TV channels on tablets and smart TVs.
  • Shoelace Wireless develops software solutions that speed up content delivery to mobile devices by combining multiple wireless networks.
  • Watchup, incubated at Stanford, reinvents news watching by providing viewers with a personalized stream of videos from the world’s most trusted news sources.

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