HUNT VALLEY, MD.—Sinclair has made a strategic investment in IRCODE, a company specializing in computer vision and AI aimed at making television interactive and shoppable.
Sinclair will also roll out IRCODE-powered interactive television through IRCODE Lens at its Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas, stations in July. Stations in other markets will follow throughout the year.
“Television has always delivered the audience. What it could not deliver was the proof of what happened next. IRCODE changes that,” said IRCODE CEO Matty Beckerman. “We give broadcasters and their advertisers the infrastructure to make every moment on screen interactive, measurable and connected to a real outcome. At Sinclair's scale, this is a new foundation for how television drives business results and how viewers connect with what they watch.”
IRCODE Lens is a 24/7 real-time interactive channel that lets viewers engage directly with what they see on screen to buy, win, connect and explore. The interactive TV solution is a white-label engagement and attribution layer that turns any piece of content or advertising into a measurable consumer touchpoint. IRCODE Lens runs entirely inside the broadcaster's existing apps, so every engagement and conversion stays first-party and owned by the station and advertiser.
The rollout will allow the stations to make interactive television a native capability inside their own platforms, giving brands and audiences a direct path to the products and experiences on screen.
IRCODE's real-time image recognition works like Shazam for images. It identifies what is on screen instantly without QR codes and connects the viewer to relevant content and commerce in the moment. The same technology is used today in 52 countries to recognize broadcast and on-screen content in real time at frame-level accuracy. The technology is format agnostic and built to create a frictionless customer journey from ads to premium content live sports and news.
To use IRCODE Lens, viewers in Salt Lake City or Austin will open their Sinclair station app, point their phone at the TV screen and move directly from what they are watching to the product or experience behind it. Because the interaction happens inside the station’s own app, the audience is identified and opted in, and every step of the journey from first scan to conversion is captured as first-party data.
For brands, interactive television closes the distance between awareness and action. An advertiser running a spot in Salt Lake City or Austin will be able to measure who engaged, what they did next and whether it led to a purchase with the same precision expected from a digital campaign. Engagement, conversion and return on investment become visible at the campaign level, and the data that proves it stays first-party to the ecosystem.
“Using their cell phone cameras and our app, viewers can participate in real time polls, comment on local news and interact with our advertisers. IRCODE is a powerful technology that provides an easy-to-use interactive experience that adds enormous value to our content. Now, we can plan on integrating user experience into our traditional over the air broadcasts,” said Del Parks, president of technology at Sinclair.
More information is available on the IRCODE and Sinclair websites.
