SAAM

SAAM (Dutch for ‘together’) brings you closer to your favourite TV show and to the fans watching together with you.

Besides live TV, SAAM offers a great interactive TV experience on demand. In the blink of an eye you can see the course of the discussion and the most-talked about moments. By clicking on a spike in the graph you can go straight to the related clip and share it with your friends. A simple yet striking feature is that all the tweets about the TV program remain visible. So you can re-live the discussion and keep the conversation going.

We love to talk about TV. We do so in the living room, around the water cooler at work, and, today,mostly via Twitter. No wonder TV shows are one of the most talked about subjects on Twitter. In some countries (such as the UK and the Netherlands), no less than 40 per cent of all prime time Twitter traffic is about TV. In other words, TV and Twitter are a golden combination.

However, TV and Twitter are separate entities for which we use different devices. We watch TV on a TV set and simultaneously follow the Twitter discussion on our laptop, tablet or mobile – the so-called “second screen”. So, we thought, if TV and Twitter belong together, why not integrate them into one platform?

Since watching TV online is on the increase (almost all broadcasters worldwide offer their content live and on demand via connected devices), the difference between TV and Internet is disappearing. This means TV and social media can now be combined to create more audience engagement. And this is exactly what SAAM does.

What did I build?

I am the technical cofounder and CTO of SAAM. The technology stack consists of an Erlang backend which handles the connection to Twitter's streaming APIs; Elasticsearch is used for data storage; on the frontend, we use a AngularJS web application which is hosted by an Elixir webserver, using the Phoenix framework.