It’s four months since former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld debuted TouchCast, an iPad app for injecting interactive and web assets in to linear video destined for publication on sites and devices.
This week, Schonfeld tells Beet.TV the startup has clocked over 100,000 app downloads and is making in-roads in to the education market. Next, however, could be media companies.
“We’re in a pilot right now with a large media company,” Schonfeld says in this video interview. “And (we’re) talking to media companies across the board about how do you introduce this to their newsroom so we see not just consumer, user-generated TouchCasts, which is our entry to the market, but also large media companies creating TouchCasts.”
With TouchCast, text-heavy online news publishers could present a package primarily in video, with web articles zoomed in by touching an embedded page thumbnail. Vice versa, broadcasters could augment their wares with related pages, maps or polls, right in the video player.
For them, such usage could go hand-in-hand with another planned TouchCast development. “We’re working on a PC version which is going to come out later this year,” Schonfeld tells Beet.TV. “That has the same UI and key new features – the ability to import video, multi-camera support and live video streaming right on top of your TouchCast.
“We see that as a tool for media companies and others to produce more robust TouchCasts.” Schonfeld says the outfit will license its authoring tool and player for money.