Numerous tools and applications are developed today in order to connect aspects of our lives. IntoNow is a new iOS app that fits into this category. It hopes to socialize the TV experience while answering the question, “What are you into now?”
As Adam Cahan, the company’s CEO, explained to WebProNews, television programming takes up 62 percent of consumers’ leisure time, which, besides sleeping and working, is the largest activity that people partake in. In addition, studies have shown that around 60 percent of people are also on the Internet while they are watching television.
For these reasons, the company wanted to create a way for users to be able to easily connect with their friends around the content that they are watching. The app does this by identifying television programs after only hearing a few seconds of them. Cahan said that the app allows users to look at their social connections, find out what they share in common, and start conversations around those areas of interest.
“For us, what was really exciting was the ability to establish those connections to say you and I both share the same show, and therefore, start a conversation around it,” he added.
Although the app is fun and interesting (it was even named Apple’s App of the Week last week), WebProNews asked Cahan why people would really be drawn to it since many of them already talk about their TV experiences on Facebook and Twitter. In response, he emphasized that IntoNow is not trying to own the conversation.
“It’s about getting recommendations and about getting a sense of your tastes, your friends’ tastes, and then starting to come back to you with ideas around things that we think you should like,” he said.
The technology that enables this experience is based on IntoNow’s SoundPrint platform. Cahan calls the process “fingerprinting,” since it takes the audio signal layer from a snippet of content and translates it into an algorithmic representation of the audio signal.
SoundPrint records 130 channels of live television continuously and is always adding to its catalog. It also has a “back catalog” that includes about 5 years of television, which equates to roughly 2.6 million individual airings.
Cahan told us that IntoNow has several ideas for monetization and is currently talking with one of the largest television manufacturers about embedding the service into TVs. He also said that we could expect an Android version and a Web application soon.
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