Social TV app IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired earlier this year for $20 to $30 million, is heading to the iPad today with the launch of a native app.
In case you aren’t familiar with IntoNow, the service IntoNow, a new service that allows you to tell your friends what television shows and movies you’re watching in realtime. But unlike other media “check-in” services, you do this simply by hitting a button and letting your phone listen to what you’re watching. It’s that audio tracing technology that made it an appealing purchase for Yahoo, compared to the plethora of other social check-in apps.
Only launched in January, the startup’s iPhone and Android apps have already seen 1.6 million downloads and are seeing high levels of engagement as well.
Because the iPad is an ideal companion for watching TVs and movies, bringing IntoNow to the device has huge potential. In fact, IntoNow founder Adam Cahan tells us that studies have shown the most popular time to use tablet devices if while consumers are watching TV. According to Nielsen, over 70% of tablet owners and 68% of Smartphone owners say they use their devices while watching TV – much of the time to look up content about a show, piece of news, that they are watching.
And IntoNow’s new iPad app is probably its most feature rich offering yet. If a user ‘checks-in’ to a program like ABC News and the subject being talked about is politics, the IntoNow feed will begin to populate with the latest news in politics from many different sources to give the user contextual information. Additionally, when the subject switches to something completely different i.e. celebrity gossip, the app is ‘listening’ for the change and will begin to automatically fill the app with news about that celebrity, Tweets about the person/people, provide videos, etc.
The app is also ideal for watching sports. If you check-in to a particular football game, you won’t just see news and Tweets about the game, but Yahoo’s stat tracker will be pulled-up so you can immediately see the score, how many yards that QB has thrown for, who has scored the touchdowns, and more.
Clearly this is a big move in the Social TV space. The user doesn’t really have to do much beyond check-in to a show, and the app does all the work, pushes the curation of content.
