Fam may add TV shows and games to its iPhone group movie app
Group movie talk Fam is thinking about adding several interactive practices to its iOS and iMessage apps, including TV shows, news movie, and other content to play and observe with friends. Fam users can talk with more than a dozen people at once.
Just four months old, Boston-based Smack, the company behind Fam, will begin by adding more games in the coming months and then expand further by working with production fucking partners and game developers.
“We believe that putting an interactive framework on top group movie is going to be the way to go,” CEO Giuseppe Stuto told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “Whether that is solely focusing on games or [includes] other forms of entertainment, more along the lines of consumed media, is something we’re experimenting with. Basically, taking what happens in real life and placing it on top of Fam — our group movie, to be specific — is how we think this becomes a daily habit, relative to the other companies in this space.”
Beyond a entire lot of games and stickers, Fam is one of the most useful and popular iMessage apps in the youthfull iMessage App Store ecosystem. Since the launch of the Fam iMessage app last December, it has remained in the top ten of the Top Free category of the iMessage App Store.
Early iMessage success vaulted the five-employee startup into competition with group movie talk apps like Houseparty, Google Duo, and Tribe. At the time of writing, Fam was #38 in the free apps part of the Social Networking category of the App Store.
Fam has millions of monthly active users, Stuto said, but he declined to state specific numbers.
“Anything we pack on top of movie is to make the practice more immersive and interactive,” he said. “Games, watching films and TV shows together, eventually even third-party developers can bring their joy instruments and games to Fam.”
Interactive practices presently available on Fam include Draw with Fam, which is basically a rendition of Pictionary, and Trivia with Fam, a trivia game.
Two weeks after the launch of iOS ten and the iMessage app, Fam launched an accompanying iOS app in order to address a prominent issue for iMessage apps: If you leave iMessage at any time, the call finishes.
That didn't work for the Fam user base, cofounder Kevin Flynn told VentureBeat. The average Fam user is inbetween the ages of thirteen and 21, with the average Fam session lasting inbetween fifteen and thirty minutes.
In the past year, talk platforms from WhatsApp to Slack to Kik have added group movie talk practices to their apps. There's no telling what switches will happen with later versions of the iOS iPhone operating system, but Fam said the creation of interactive services will be critical.
“We’re discovering more and more that the most valuable practices are the ones that permit you to do more social interaction — games, consuming other content, like TV shows and movies. So we think that concentrate and the social practice in your networks is going to be kind of our anchor point,” Flynn said.
The iMessage App Store and iOS ten were very first made available last September. Last month, Smack announced that it had raised $1.8 million to grow the audience of its iMessage and iOS apps.