The Future of TV
The Future of TV
With the company dissolving, two intoxicated hosts stare at a champagne bottle and prepare to broadcast the app's chaotic, penniless finale.
[Speaker 1]: It is Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2020. We are inside the New York headquarters of what was, just two years prior, the most talked-about app on the planet. [Speaker 2]: The mood inside the studio is... chaotic. The hosts, Matt Richards and Anna Roisman, are live on air, broadcasting to thousands of phones. They are visibly intoxicated. There is a bottle of champagne sitting on the desk. But this isn't a celebration. [Speaker 1]: No. They’re drunk because they just found out the company is dissolving. And at the end of the game, 523 players win. They’re expecting a payout. But the company bank account is effectively at zero. [Speaker 2]: So, Matt Richards, the host, reaches into his own pocket, pulls out a crumpled five-dollar bill, and holds it up to the camera. He says *that* is the prize pool. [Speaker 1]: The app that was once valued at
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00 million ended with a payout of less than a penny per person-paid for by the host’s personal cash. [Speaker 2]: Today, we’re looking at the rise and fall of HQ Trivia. How did a company that pioneered the "future of TV" go from millions of players to a five-dollar payout in just 30 months? [Speaker 1]: And before we get into the mechanics of the collapse, I want you to keep an eye on that bottle of champagne on the desk. Because the story of why they bought that specific bottle-and when they finally decided to pop it-tells you everything you need to know about why this failed. [Speaker 2]: To understand the hysteria, we have to go back to 2017. The digital landscape was shifting. Vine-the looping video app-had just been shut down by Twitter. [Speaker 1]: Right. And the founders of Vine, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll, were feeling what they called "seller's remorse." They sold Vine too early, watched Twitter kill it, and vowed that their next project would be something they controlled completely. [Speaker 2]: Their thesis was bold. They called it "The Future of TV." They wanted to bring the "appointment viewing" habits of the 1950s-where everyone gathers around the screen at the same time-to the iPhone. [Speaker 1]: Which, if you think about how we used phones in 2017, was counter-intuitive. Everything was on-demand. Netflix, YouTube... watch whenever you want. They were saying, "No, you have to be here at 3:00 PM Eastern, or you miss it." [Speaker 2]: The concept was HQ Trivia. A live game show on your phone. You tune in, answer 12 questions, and if you survive, you split the cash. But making that happen technically was a nightmare. [Speaker 1]: Why is that? We had live streaming in 2017. Facebook Live existed. Periscope existed. [Speaker 2]: We did, but not like this. We have to pause here to explain the tech, because it’s easy to overlook how hard this was. Traditional broadcast TV has a delay-or latency-of about 7 to 30 seconds. [Speaker 1]: Meaning, if I see a touchdown on TV, it actually happened 30 seconds ago in the stadium. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. Now, if you’re playing a trivia game for money, and you have a 30-second delay, you can just Google the answer before the timer runs out. Or, if my stream is faster than yours, I see the question five seconds before you do. [Speaker 1]: So the game breaks. [Speaker 2]: It breaks completely. So Colin Kroll, the technical co-founder, had to engineer a way to sync video for millions of people with *sub-second* latency. Everyone sees the host, Scott Rogowsky, at… Try stream view →