For the second year running, the U.K. industry’s...

selected by a panel of industry experts from a short list of eight after a Dragon’s Den grilling at the DTG’s London headquarters Wednesday evening. One winner, CrowdEmotion, uses facial recognition software to read TV viewers’ expressions as they watch a broadcast in real time. Another, StreamHub, combines conventional audience viewing figures with data collected from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A third, Grabyo, is a simple cloud-based editing program that lets users quickly edit video clips from a live online broadcast, and add fade-ins and -outs and ads for feeds to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all within 30 seconds. The fourth, Chirp, works as a sonic barcode, embedding audible trigger sounds in a TV broadcast, public address system, or sound from a doorbell, toy or greeting card. The tone, which is 1.8 seconds long and modeled on the natural sound of a wren bird, carries 50 bits of data at a very slow rate, but very robustly. The data is coded to tell any mobile device with an open microphone and enabling Chirp app to download interactive content such as links, video or images. Said Chirp’s inventor and CEO, Patrick Bergel, when we asked why he didn’t use Bluetooth: “Bluetooth? Are you serious? There are more loudspeakers on planet Earth than people. All mobile devices have microphones and most are always on, listening. The Chirp is a mixture of real musical tones -- in fact flautists could play them if they could play at 170 beats per minute -- and they are in the frequency range 7.5-11 kHz, which even the cheapest mobile speaker can reproduce.” Other finalists that didn’t make the cut: (1) Ad Venture TV, which replaces broadcast ads with personalized ones; (2) AutoGraph.me, an electronic program guide tailored from audience viewing preferences, with low-power Bluetooth used to identify individual viewers; (3) Freesat Freetime, a satellite-based EPG that gives connected TV sets forward and backward scheduling, and is already used by Panasonic in the U.K. for terrestrial and satellite viewing; (4) Live Box, a remote-controlled camera, microphone, speaker and lighting combination unit that uses a 4G SIM card for two-way audio and video capture and monitoring with low latency. “The quality and diversity of this year’s entries shows us how much television technology innovation is coming out of, or scaling up, in the U.K.,” said DTG CEO Richard Lindsay-Davies, who chaired the Dragon’s Den event. But he warned the four winners, from his personal experience of more IBC visits than he said he could remember, that they were in for an exhausting few days.