Yahoo has dived headfirst into the new mobile-TV-plus-social-interaction game, and is actually getting some pretty rave reviews. The app (for the iPad and iPhone) is called IntoNow, and when you boot it up, you tap the green button that greets you while you are watching TV. The app uses the built-in microphone on your iDevice to hear the show and channel you are watching. Within a few seconds it brings up a whole page dedicated to the channel you are viewing, related content, pictures, articles, personalized recommendations and discussions where you can chat with friends and fans.
You can see immediately what your friends are watching (as long as they are also running the app), and you can see Facebook and Twitter messages as they go out. Genres such as news and sports are fully supported, with the latest headlines and scores right there on the device. It is a lot like Shazam but for your TV.
The magic part of knowing what you are watching comes from Soundprint, Yahoo’s patented indexing technology. Known as video fingerprinting technology, Yahoo’s app can tag a show within seconds. It can do this because the company has indexed the past five years of television, covering 2.6 million airings, 140 million minutes of previously aired shows. They say that is 266 years of video, so we’ll trust them on that.
The app is pretty amazing now, but it will be interesting to see where Yahoo takes it. The company has already done a big 2.0 update and has a lot of plans to make your TV viewing and mobile experience a robust one. You can download IntoNow in Apple’s iTunes store right now.
