YC-Backed Vidpresso Offers Low-Cost Tools For Adding Tweets And Ads To Broadcast TV

Vidpresso wants to change the way that TV producers insert media into their broadcasts, with a low-cost, software-based solution that could fundamentally change their cost structure. At just $500 a month, the company is already giving producers tools to insert Tweets and Facebook messages on TV. Next up: ads.

If you’re a local TV station that wants to insert messages into your broadcasts, you usually have to buy specialized equipment to do so. And then spend upwards of tens of thousands of dollars a month to run it.

Vidpresso, on the other hand, doesn’t require any equipment on its own, and it works with the existing hardware that is already available in broadcast studios. It charges just $500 a month to give studios the ability to insert different types of media into broadcasts.

It allows a producer to log in, quickly search Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and be able to display content from those networks on broadcast in seconds. So far, that’s captured the interest of some big clients — including CNN and Univision — but there’s a large number of small regional broadcast operations that it can go after.

We’ve written about Vidpresso before. A couple of times, actually.

What’s new now is that the company is a part of Y Combinator’s most recent class, and it’s experimenting with content other than Tweets or Facebook comments that can be shared on broadcast TV. Such as ads, for instance.

According to CEO Randall Bennett, there are millions of dollars of inefficiency in broadcast TV. “If an iPad can work as well as an Omneon machine,” he asks, “why are people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars they don’t have to?”

The hope is that he can take that idea and translate it into offering up a software-based TV system in a box that could eliminate the need for overly expensive hardware and services. The ad module is currently being tested by some smaller stations, but if it catches on, it could mark a big change for the industry as a whole.

For years, Vidpresso has been bootstrapping, but it’s looking to take some funding and start expanding its staff in earnest. That starts with seed money Y Combinator and YCVC, which should allow it to start hiring more sales and engineering folks to take the idea to the next level.

Wanna see how it works? Check out the video below: