What's on your TV?

Leading up to its launch in October, British social TV start-up Zeebox attracted plenty of attention within the television industry. Its iPad app was hailed as innovative and disruptive: a second-screen electronic programme guide that used Facebook and Twitter to guide people’s viewing choices by what their friends and the wider world were watching and tweeting about.

Talk to founders Anthony Rose and Ernesto Schmitt and it’s clear that this is just the beginning. “The emergence of net-connected TVs; the mass proliferation of companion devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets; and people’s expectations that entertainment will be socially connected felt like a perfect storm,” says Schmitt. “The time was right to revolutionise TV.”

The potentially revolutionary stuff is what’s coming in the next few months, though. Starting with a feature called Showtime, which debuted last month through a partnership with Channel 4, based on its reality show Desperate Scousewives.

“Showtime is a tool that allows broadcasters to use our platform to plug in their own content,” he says.

The pitch to broadcasters and producers is that making this content for Zeebox is a better bet than splashing out on their own standalone apps for individual shows. It isn’t alone in this idea: Shazam, Umami and Yahoo’s IntoNow are three other firms working with similar ideas.

Showtime was added to Zeebox’s iPad app in its v1.1.0 update, which went live in November. Alongside it was another feature called Starwatch, which Rose says taps into the hundreds of celebrities who are tweeting about their own TV viewing habits.
“We made a list of about 400 celebrities,” Rose says. “And when they tweet around a programme, our servers follow them and hashtag it, then assign them to that programme in Zeebox and show their icon in the interface.” In other words, Zeebox users watching a show will be able to see which celebrities are also watching and tweeting about it. Or, indeed, watching and tweeting about something on another channel. “Celebrities can become the TV schedulers of the future by saying ‘I’m watching this’ and that going out to the Twitter audience.”

Social features are key to Zeebox, but they are criticised by people who don’t want their TV viewing to have social networking imposed upon it. Rose admits that plenty of people aren’t attracted by the idea. “Some people over 35 are a bit scared of it, but people under 35 can’t get enough of it.”

Give it a try
Rose stresses that Zeebox will not force its user to log in to Facebook, and points to its private viewing mode, which is used when someone doesn’t want to share what they’re watching. “If you haven’t tried a companion viewing app because you think it’ll detract from your viewing, try it and you’ll see. It may be better or worse for different shows, but even if it only enhances a third of your viewing, that’s good.”

Next up for Zeebox is an iPhone version that is almost ready, with Android to follow afterwards. After that? E-commerce. It’s working on ways to help people buy the products they see in TV shows and adverts from within its app. “We’ll use video recognition to recognise ads on TV, so for something like Nike you’ll be able to buy the product from your second screen with a few clicks,” he says. “But this can apply to the songs playing on TV, and links to catch-up content.”

Getting Zeebox to integrate tightly with personal video recorders and video-on-demand services is on its agenda for 2012.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd