After the QR Code: IRCODE, Sinclair and the Scannable Broadcast
IRCODE founder Matty Beckerman on Sinclair’s investment, the death of the QR code and the race to get inside the smartphone camera.
A year ago, at Cannes Lions, Matty Beckerman was showing pilots. This June, aboard the IRCODE yacht in the Old Port in Cannes, he was scanning a live television broadcast from Salt Lake City and pulling up the attribution data behind every advert in real time. In between, Sinclair, the second-largest station owner in the United States, wrote him a cheque.
Beckerman is the Founder and Chief Executive of IRCODE, a computer vision company built on a simple premise: the image itself is the code. Point a phone at a television screen, a billboard or an album cover and the technology recognises what it sees, no QR code required.
The underlying patents were filed in 2015 by Philipp Holzschneider, a Berlin-based engineer with a background in drone vision systems who now serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Beckerman acquired the intellectual property around three years ago and has been building on it since.
“We’re creating a digital layer to the physical world,” he told me. “Whether it’s in real life or watching a television show, you scan with the lens and get all the information behind it.”
When we first spoke in 2025, the obvious question was defensive: how long before Google, Meta or Amazon simply absorbed the idea? Beckerman’s answer this year was to point at the filing cabinet. “We are filing new patents almost once a month,” he said. “The nice news is our patents have been around since 2015, are in 25 countries around the world and are fully issued. They’re not pending.”
It is a lawyer’s answer to a product question. Apple and Google have both shipped visual search of their own since those first filings, and whether ten-year-old patents constrain products that already exist is a harder test than whether they deter copycats.
Will.I.Am explains how IRCODE works, on the IRCODE Yacht at the Cannes Lions Festival.
Salt Lake City does what pitch decks cannot
Beckerman’s evidence was a live feed. He brought up KSL, Bonneville International’s NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, and scanned the broadcast as it aired.
“The entire broadcast for KSL is now scannable and interactive, the whole thing start to finish,” he said. “Rather than talking about deployments, this is actually in the market and working, and we have users doing this every day.”
Matty Beckerman, Founder & CEO IRCODE
The KSL Lens sits inside the station’s existing news app. Viewers point their phone at the screen during a bulletin or an ad break, and the app recognises the content, surfacing programme information, offers and competitions. The station promotes the feature on air, including a weekly $1,000 prize draw for users who scan commercials.
My own research ahead of the interview put KSL at around 18,500 scans with a 33% average click-through rate. Beckerman did not dispute the figures. “It’s so far beyond a QR code scan that it’s kind of astounding,” he said. “We’re seeing a 30%-plus click-through rate, which is a huge deal for us.”
These are strong numbers from a small base. Salt Lake City is a market of roughly a million TV households, and 18,500 scans, generated with heavy on-air promotion and a cash incentive behind them, is an encouraging start rather than evidence of a habit.
Nobody yet knows whether the scanning outlasts the novelty and the prize money, and finding out will cost a
station group real money.
Sinclair’s investment turns a demo into infrastructure
Sinclair has decided to spend it. Two days before we spoke, the group announced a strategic investment in IRCODE, undisclosed in size, alongside a commitment to roll out IRCODE Lens across its stations.
Sinclair operates the second-largest television station portfolio in the United States, 185 stations across 86 markets, reaching roughly 40% of American households.
“We’re starting with two stations in July, in Austin and Salt Lake City,” Beckerman said. “Then we have ten more right behind that, and the plan is to be able to do this across their entire ecosystem.”
Local station sales teams have spent a decade losing advertising budgets to digital platforms that can prove outcomes. Scannable broadcast gives them something to sell back.
“The ad sales team can now go out and speak to all their local advertisers and say, we can give you real attribution, we can reach your consumer directly,” Beckerman said. Because the interaction happens inside the station’s own app, the engagement and conversion data stay first-party, owned by the station and its advertisers rather than a platform intermediary.
He puts the wider ambition plainly. “I would like to be on every television set, at least in the United States, by next year, and then expanding to the rest of the world.”
The consumer app is dead; the camera is the prize
A year ago, IRCODE was preparing to launch a direct-to-consumer app. That plan is gone. Beckerman explained the switch from chasing consumers directly to selling the technology to other businesses.
“We were going to focus on B2C, building our own consumer app and getting it out there in a major way,” Beckerman said. “But we found that white labelling our technology into existing apps is the best way to go. That’s the way people want it. You’re not having to download a new app.”
Amazon has Amazon Lens, and Google has Google Lens; IRCODE now builds lenses for everyone else, branded as theirs, running inside apps their audiences already have. That positions IRCODE as infrastructure and explains why the pipeline runs through TV networks rather than agencies or brands.
The ambition runs further, into the smartphone camera itself, which is where QR code reading eventually ended up.
“Pre-COVID, you had to download a third-party app, and then it went into the camera,” Beckerman said. “We’re hoping that’s our path.”
That path runs through Cupertino, and Beckerman has been laying groundwork. IRCODE has built for the Apple Vision Pro, and he says Apple has granted the company camera access on the device, something Apple rarely extends. He has also built for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and Snapchat’s Spectacles.
The attribution claims survive questioning, mostly
IRCODE’s pitch leans on deterministic attribution, a phrase the industry has learnt to distrust. Beckerman’s response was to show the back end.
In front of me, he pulled up the KSL analytics, individual scans registering in Utah in real time, then drilled into a single local advertiser: every airing of their spot, every scan against it, every click that followed.
The data is anonymised for privacy compliance, he said, but it is structured at the user level. “It’s no longer theoretical. This is a user doing this. Finally, this is real attribution data.”
The company’s marketing materials make bolder claims, including uplift figures of five to ten times for gamified and host-endorsed content. I asked whether those numbers came from controlled tests or live markets.
Brittany Hershkowitz, IRCODE’s Chief Marketing and Brand Officer, gave a more careful answer: “That’s a combined gamification number. One was in a controlled environment; one was in a live environment.” Buyers should read the headline multiples accordingly.
What the system cannot yet see is the whole funnel. Networks can measure engagement up to a point, after which the brand owns the data, and neither side can see across the join.
Hershkowitz said the company is building towards closing that gap, though she would not discuss details. “You’d be able to see the entire funnel, all the way from the moment you scan to an abandoned cart.”
If IRCODE delivers that, the claim stops being about interactive TV and starts being about measurement infrastructure. That is a far bigger market, and a much harder one to win.
Interactive TV stopped needing the smart TV
IRCODE’s lens works against an ordinary over-the-air feed, which is where the threat to connected TV lies. That market is where most of television’s advertising money is now heading. “You don’t have to have a connected television,” Beckerman said. “Now we make everything connected.”
CTV’s commercial pitch rests on the operating system in the set: interactivity, addressability and measurement as features of the platform. A phone camera that makes a 15-year-old panel shoppable moves those capabilities from the television to the viewer’s pocket, and hands the resulting data to the broadcaster, not the device maker.
For the companies that sell smart TV operating systems as the gateway to interactive advertising, that is an awkward proposition.
The QR code is the named casualty, but the platforms are the real fight
Asked who loses as IRCODE scales, Beckerman did not hesitate. “I’ll tell you who does lose in this: anyone who wants to keep a QR code on the screen. I think that’s going to go away.”
Craig Kallman, who ran Atlantic Records for three decades and is now Chief Music Officer at Warner Music Group, invested in IRCODE around six months ago. Beckerman relayed Kallman’s verdict with obvious relish: “He said, man, I feel like it’s the hair metal days and you just played me Nirvana’s demo, and no one realises what’s going to happen.”
The KSL numbers are promising, if small. The Sinclair rollout is barely a month old. And the big platforms have not stood still since Holzschneider filed his first patent.
Amazon and Google operate lenses at a scale IRCODE cannot match, and Apple now ships Visual Intelligence natively on recent iPhones, a long press on a side button that searches whatever the camera sees. Beckerman wants IRCODE to end up inside that camera. Apple has already filled it with its own.
Related Article
Beyond the QR Code: How IRCODE Aims to Make the Visual World Scannable
Imagine pointing your phone at a television screen, a fashion spread, or a Renaissance painting and unlocking a layer of rich, contextual digital content without needing a QR code or visible prompt. This is the ambition of IRCODE a visual recognition platform developed from drone navigation technology and now led by CEO and founder Matty Beckerman.