Wednesday, February 2, 2011

IntoNow: An iPhone App Identifies Live TV Programs by Listening

IntoNow: An iPhone App Identifies Live TV Programs by Listening
Imagine being blindfolded and asked to identify your favorite television shows by listening to their sound. I can confidently say that I’d be able to identify 20 odd shows by listening in to the audio. And even by the wildest stretch of imagination, hardcore couch potatoes would at best be able to identify a few [...]

Imagine being blindfolded and asked to identify your favorite television shows by listening to their sound. I can confidently say that I’d be able to identify 20 odd shows by listening in to the audio. And even by the wildest stretch of imagination, hardcore couch potatoes would at best be able to identify a few hundreds. To put things in perspective, the IntoNow iPhone app has the capability to identify 2.6 million TV shows and even the specific episodes within 4-12 seconds.

Sounds too good to believe? Try IntoNow and find out for yourself.

IntoNow is easy to use – simply select the TV icon and IntoNow gets to work trying to listen in on what you are watching on TV or Internet. In a matter of seconds, the app returns the exact episode, and even identifies whether the content is airing live or if it’s a rebroadcast. What’s more, users can save these episodes to their Netflix instant queue as well.

IntoNow is developed on a technology called SoundPrint, an in-house indexing platform which is capable of identifying what’s being watched, down to the individual episode, within seconds. IntoNow can currently identify 140 million minutes of previously aired shows which amounts to 266 years of video. SoundPrint monitors 130 channels of live cable and network TV
round the clock to continuously enhance its video base. Clearly, you have to be television addict to even tap one-tenth of IntoNow’s video base.

The app has social features which lets users share what they’re watching with friends on Twitter and Facebook. While the concept itself is brilliant and the app itself is a free download from the iTunes store, several users have reported crashes and timeouts thereby raising question marks over the robustness of IntoNow.

None the less, as an avid iPhone app evaluator, I come across a number of ordinary and some extraordinary apps. From whatever I’ve seen of IntoNow till now, it surely belongs to the latter category. If you haven’t tried IntoNow till now, I’d recommend you do so now. Trust me – you won’t be disappointed.



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