You'll be able to tag TV shows with Shazam soon enough
The popular music tagging service Shazam has reached 250 million users and has unleashed the ability to tag TV shows as well. The added functionality will enable users to find out what music is playing, who's acting on-screen, and more. The service is available in app form for Windows Phone, but it's often overshadowed by Microsoft's own Bing Audio music tagging integration on the mobile platform, which offers identical functionality.
Though TV show tagging is US-only, it's an interesting feature addition. Shazam Chief Revenue Officer Doug Garland added the following comment:
"Each week we get more than two million users. People think it's magical. But the reason people come back is because there's an amazing degree of utility. We noticed that 54 percent of users were using Shazam at least once a week to tag things on TV... so we thought that there's a lot more we can do with this. Interactive TV has been roadkill thus far on the information superhighway."
Shazam has worked with over 140 brands to integrate Shazam inside advertisements, but hopes to also integrate specific TV shows.
If Shazam isn't up your street then fear not as we believe Microsoft will be introducing such functionality into Bing to join its Audio service. The company purchased VideoSurf (www.videosurf.com) which is a startup that enables users to search videos across the likes of YouTube, Hulu, CNN, TMZ, Dailymotion, Comedy Central. The service was demonstrated at E3 earlier this year on the Xbox 360 console. With any luck, we'll be seeing this arriving on Windows Phone.
As well as searching through content, VideoSurf sports audio and facial recognition technology that allows the service to pull information down that's both accurate and relevant to what's currently displayed on the large screen. How this could be implemented on Windows Phone is still a good question - one possibility could be through use of the camera to record a segment of the show / film.
A short conclusion can be drafted that Shazam is expanding its service to cover not only music, but TV as well. It's attempting to become the companion app that every couch potato requires. Microsoft, on the other hand, already has the products and services in the living room. All that's left is to add VideoSurf to Windows 8, Windows Phone and the Xbox and we could be onto a winner.
Currently, Shazam and Shazam Encore are at version 2.2 and have not had an update just yet. We'll keep an eye out if and when that does come forward and do a follow up post. In the meantime, get Shazam (free) here and Shazam Encore ($5.99) here if you're curious.
via: The Verge
