Anthony Rose, technical driving force behind the BBC iPlayer and before that Kazaa, this week returns to the start-up world with Zeebox, an iPad app designed to tap the growing trend for “dual screening”.
At the same time as watching live TV, users of Zeebox can chat to their friends on Twitter and Facebook, see what they are watching, pull up extra information about a show’s participants or topics, and buy related items.
The app looks something like a real-time TV guide, with the ability to order channels according to popularity, and can also act as a remote control for internet-connected TVs.
Aimed initially at the UK market, Zeebox is already in the App Store’s top five most popular downloads after launching on Friday. An accompanying website and HTML5 web app go live on Tuesday.
Mr Rose co-founded Zeebox in April with Ernesto Schmitt, a serial entrepreneur who has also worked at EMI, DSG and Tesco. The company raised £5m in venture funding from undisclosed investors.
Zeebox sees a shift for the former iPlayer CTO (who also had a brief stint at British internet-TV venture YouView) from catch-up to live TV. In spite of the advent of iPlayer, YouTube and digital video recorders such as Virgin Media’s Tivo and Sky+, the majority of television is still watched at the time of broadcast.
“We expect entertainment to be socially connected, transaction-enabled so we can buy things, information-augmented so we can dig deeper, participatory and interactive,” says Mr Schmitt. “The one place where we consume the vast majority of entertainment – the living room – remains unchanged.”
Many of the biggest shows – from highbrow political slots such as BBC Question Time to reality-TV hits like X-Factor and even Downton Abbey’s period drama – are already subject to feverish discussion on Facebook and Twitter. Through hashtags and other semantic smarts, Zeebox will pull this chatter into its app. Tweeting from the app comes with a link back to the Zeebox site, attracting other users.
Of course, for many shows there are already dedicated apps for social media, and Twitter and Facebook themselves are doing a pretty good job at working directly with TV companies to drive online discussion and “engagement”.
But Zeebox provides other goodies too. Its servers are constantly processing a live broadcast feed to pull out keywords of what’s being discussed on a show; these are shown on each programme’s page in real-time, to provide extra information from places like Wikipedia, iTunes or Amazon links and relevant ads.
All this, Rose and Schmitt claim, is just making easier what already happens on sofas around the country, citing research that 30 per cent of all internet usage in the UK is done while watching TV; more than half of viewers have one eye on the big screen, but another on the laptop or tablet as they browse the web or send emails. Although over-35s are not such avid social networkers during shows, the Zeebox app is designed to serve up other kinds of information too.
Rose and Schmitt hope that Zeebox will eventually become a platform for broadcasters’ and programme-makers accompanying apps, as it can provide a new level of detailed data about who is watching their shows. It’s a broad and ambitious vision but with this team, it’ll be one to watch.
