HQ Trivia hopes to be TV of the future
Live-streaming app is a hit, with hundreds of thousands participating to win money
These are heady times for the creators of HQ Trivia.
The app, which broadcasts live shows to iPhones and iPads twice a day, has taken off since its debut in August. Its ability to attract tens of thousands of people to log in for each 15-minute segment in hopes of winning money by answering a dozen trivia questions has some wondering if it has reimagined the TV game show for the cord-cutting era.
And its success with live-streaming video on phones — an area in which Facebook and Twitter have heavily invested, with mixed results — has the technology and media worlds buzzing. It has even weathered its first public relations crisis, after Rus Yusupov, one of HQ Trivia’s founders, tried to quash a profile of the show’s host by the Daily Beast, an embarrassing kerfuffle that nonetheless increased awareness of the app.
“It’s clear that there’s a lot of attention on us now because this thing has blown up overnight, practically,” Yusupov said in an interview. “We have ambitions to essentially build the future of TV and, yeah, there is a lot of pressure to get everything right all the time, and I admit that I made a mistake.”
Yusupov and his co-founder, Colin Kroll, both 33, previously founded the six-second video app Vine, which Twitter bought in 2012 and shuttered this year. The two, based in New York, have been working to develop video apps for the past two years with “a few million dollars” in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the first institution to invest in Snapchat. (The firm is also the source of HQ’s daily cash prizes, at least until the company figures out an advertising model.)
HQ emerged from the ashes of a less popular live-streaming video app the men created called Hype, which sought to let users add pictures and music to broadcasts but lost its audience over time. HQ takes its cues from traditional game shows such as Jeopardy! as well as Twitch, the video-streaming site for gamers that Amazon owns.
It’s easy to feel that a strange new future has arrived upon opening the free app for the first time. The game — available only on Apple devices, though an Android version is scheduled to arrive around Christmas — features a counter in the corner of the screen that ticks up as people log on to play at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. eastern time on weekdays and 9 p.m. on weekends. (Its highest number of concurrent viewers was 240,000 on Nov. 26. For comparison, the exploding watermelon that BuzzFeed livestreamed on Facebook last year reached just more than 800,000 concurrent viewers at its peak.)
The show, which can be glitchy, is typically hosted by an energetic comedian, Scott Rogowsky, who cracks jokes as he asks a dozen multiplechoice questions of increasing difficulty. Players use their touch screens to respond in less than 10 seconds, and the app shows how many people are eliminated after each round. Players can also share their reactions via a rapid-fire chat function at the bottom of the screen.
It can make one cringe to see what questions lead to a “savage” (translation: major) elimination of players. For example, at least 20,000 people were unable to identify the correct spelling of “embarrassed.” But the app tests a range of knowledge: Carson Daly, the former MTV host, posted on Instagram that he was excited to be an option for “Who co-hosted the first season of American Idol with Ryan Seacrest in 2002?”
Early questions tend to be on the easier side, like: “Which president is featured on the U.S. one dollar bill?” Those who answer all the questions correctly share in a prize that has fluctuated between hundreds and thousands of dollars and is distributed via PayPal.
Kroll, a Twitch fan, said that much of what people knew as live video from apps such as Twitter’s Peri- scope lacked a sense of urgency and participation.
“There’s a point-of-view live, where you’re experiencing something through someone else’s phone, and then there’s this idea of interactive video, where the audience is actually a key component of driving the content,” he said. “I became really interested in the latter and saw there was a real absence in the market of that sort of experience.”
It is of note that for all the investment Silicon Valley has made into live video — a bid for the billions of ad dollars that remain locked in TV — HQ is a New York product. Yusupov said HQ could “only be built in New York or L.A.,” because the inspiration comes from Hollywood-style production values, not software. (Their startup is called Intermedia Labs in a nod to interactivity and media.)
“We schedule our lives, but the apps on our phones have been designed to make content available anytime, anywhere,” Yusupov said.
“We suffer from the paradox of choice, ultimately — you search Netflix for 20 minutes and end up watching nothing.”
Kroll added that HQ’s schedule was inspiring people to play with coworkers in the afternoon and again with family and friends in the evening, making it more akin to a broadcast TV program.
“It’s a little bit trite to say, but things grow because they’re fun,” said Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “This is way more fun than playing a quiz game on your phone and way more fun than watching Jeopardy! on TV.”
Still, whether HQ can turn its sudden popularity into a long-term business is an open question. Could it ultimately serve as a blueprint for bigger tech companies that have been looking for ways to drum up interest in live video content? Kroll and Yusupov were hesitant to share details around how they produce the show and what, if any, parts of HQ could be patented. They also declined to disclose the number of people they employ.
“It’s a little bit trite to say, but things grow because they’re fun.” JEREMY LIEW LIGHTSPEED VENTURE PARTNERS