Trebble.fm: The Easiest Way To Enter The Smart Speaker Market
Smart speakers are a brand new way for media companies to reach audiences.
The smart speaker market is growing fast.
At the start of 2018, a full 16 per cent of Americans owned a smart speaker device, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, according to recent NPR and Edison Research surveys. That number is poised to more than double in the next two years, a growth rate not seen since the introduction of the smartphone, notes the study.
According to eMarketer’s 2018 forecast, the number of U.S. smart speaker owners will rise to 76.5 million by 2020. Media companies and content creators should take note. Smart speakers are effectively creating a new medium to reach audiences.
There’s just one hitch: streaming your voice via Google Home or Amazon Echo can be complicated. That’s especially true for smaller-scale media companies or independent producers who don’t have technical teams to handle the bulk of the work.
But Trebble.fm, a Digital News Innovation Challenge (DNIC) participating company, makes it easy.
“Trebble.fm is an online ecosystem that makes it easy for people with no technical experience to create and distribute content on voice-activated speakers” describes Armel Tchemeube, the company’s founder and CEO.
Through the Trebble.fm platform, users can create 90-second pieces of audio content (what Tchemeube calls “Trebble capsules” or “shortcasts”) that are then instantly connected to a Google Home or Amazon Echo.
“One of the advantages of sharing content on Trebble.fm is the fact that you can connect with people on a very regular basis” said Tchemeube. Users can listen to a host’s voice everyday, if not more, creating a deep connection between audience and content-creator, he added.
Trebble.fm is kind of like YouTube, but for smart speakers, a comparison that isn’t lost on Tchemeube. But unlike YouTube, he said, creating quality content on Trebble.fm doesn’t take as much time and money to produce.
While the platform is still in its beta stage, the end-goal for the company is to create a free-to-use platform that content creators can actually make money from.
“We want to empower people to create their content and to help them generate revenue from the content they’re creating”
Article written by Michael D’Alimonte
