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“We have ambitions to essentially build the future of TV,” said Rus Yusupov, right, with Colin Kroll, his co-founder of HQ Trivia. CreditSasha Maslov for The New York Times
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,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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 like “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 — currently 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 live-streamed on
Facebook last year reached just over 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
multiple-choice 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.
Mr. Kroll, a Twitch fan, said that much of what people knew
as live video from apps like Twitter’s Periscope 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’s 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. Mr. 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 start-up 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,” Mr. Yusupov said. “We
suffer from the paradox of choice ultimately — you search Netflix for 20
minutes and end up watching nothing.”
Mr. Kroll added that HQ’s schedule was inspiring people to
play with co-workers 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? Mr. Kroll and Mr. 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.
Such guardedness is perhaps understandable in a landscape
where companies like Facebook are quick to replicate good ideas from
competitors on a massive scale. (See, for example, Instagram Stories.) But the
lack of transparency caused some trouble for HQ recently, when Mr. Yusupov told
The Daily Beast that it was “completely unauthorized” to write a profile of Mr.
Rogowsky, even threatening to fire the host if the article was published.
“I learned what I do know, and that’s apps and engineers and
designers, and I learned what I don’t know, which is how to work with talent
and celebrities,” Mr. Yusupov said. He added that the company had since hired a
public relations representative and a person to manage talent.
The men said that HQ had been approached by a bevy of ad
agencies and chief marketing officers but that they were still determining how
sponsorships could be worked into the app. Mr. Yusupov said brands could potentially
fund the prizes, adding that a goal was offering a $1 million prize.
Mr. Liew said he was confident in the start-up and its
eventual business plan even as he expected other companies to mimic what HQ
Trivia had done.
“You have to let time talk and figure out how people are
interacting and using something before you have clarity with a business model,”
he said. More important, he added, “if you can become part of popular culture,
you can figure out a way to make money.”
