The engineer who decided the audience should get to talk back to the screen - and built an Emmy-winning company to make it happen.
▲ The loudest suit on the floor. Albritton at NAB, where the Megaphone crew showed up in red you could hear from across the room.
Megaphone TV calls itself the world's first Participation Entertainment Studio. Dan Albritton is the one who decided that phrase needed to exist.
Right now Albritton runs the company he started in 2007, and the product is the thing you have probably used without knowing its name. When a live broadcast asks you to vote, guess the winner, enter a contest, or tap a poll on the screen, there is a decent chance Megaphone is the plumbing underneath. The platform stitches together interactive on-air graphics, nationwide real-time polling, trivia, gaming, social media, and ads you can actually act on - all layered onto live video as it airs.
His clients are the names on the dial: AMC, ABC, Bravo, CBS, FOX, NBC, Sinclair, TEGNA, TV Azteca, Univision, and YouTube. The interactivity has surfaced on Talking Dead, Top Chef, Live! with Kelly and Michael, and E!'s Oscars red carpet coverage. By 2018 the company reported an active presence in 24 of the top 25 US broadcast markets.
Albritton describes his own specialty as the area between TV production and game design. It is a strange, narrow seam - and he had to build a whole company to stand in it.
Figures drawn from Megaphone TV and press releases, 2015-2022.
The future of television is the audience answering back. Passive viewing was never the deal - it was just the only option.
Albritton did not arrive in broadcasting through broadcasting. He studied biomedical engineering at Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science in the late 1990s, and spent time as a student researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - the kind of resume line that usually leads to a microscope, not a remote control.
Instead he went into digital media: producer roles at Whittman-Hart/marchFIRST, Dentsu eMarketing One, and the design shop B2/marumushi. Then he enrolled at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, the famous ITP, where engineers go to learn how to make machines feel human.
In 2006 he co-founded iminlikewithyou, a playful Y Combinator startup that mixed dating and games. It grew up into OMGPOP - the studio later acquired by Zynga and best known for the runaway hit Draw Something. Albritton had moved on by then, but the lesson stuck: people will do almost anything if you turn it into a game.
A year into iminlikewithyou, in 2007, he started Megaphone TV. The bet was simple and stubborn. Take the engineer's instinct for systems, the game designer's instinct for play, and the producer's instinct for live moments, and aim all three at the one screen that had never let you push back: the television.
At NAB 2018 the Megaphone crew wore loud red suits you could hear from across the showroom. They wore them again at LMA Fest. When your whole product is about getting noticed, you dress the part.
Biomedical engineering and a national lab were the starting line. Live television was the finish. Few resumes contain both Lawrence Livermore and Bravo's Top Chef.
Before Megaphone he helped birth the studio behind Draw Something. The instinct - make people play - carried straight into how he reinvented the broadcast.
He calls his specialty the space between TV production and game design. There was no department for that. So he built the company.
His real product is the phone you already hold while watching. Megaphone turns it into a vote, a guess, a contest entry - in real time, nationwide.
Among his leadership: ActionScript legend and author Colin Moock as Chief Product Officer. Albritton recruits builders who already wrote the book.
A long-form sit-down on where live television is going and why participation is the point.