AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

Watch TV While Syncing Music, Taking Screengrabs and Group Chatting With IntoNow’s iPad App

The goal of “technology powered media company” IntoNow, purchased by Yahoo! last year, was to create an engaging connection between TV-watching, iPhone and iPad use. This sounds easy in theory, as 80% of users now watch TV with a mobile device in their hands, but it turns out most of those folks are checking email and playing games, as TechCrunch rightfully quips.

How do you get these people to pay attention to TV stuff on that second screen? By facilitating TV-related content surfing that would actually be of interest (even if many users don’t know it yet).

IntoNow’s latest release, according to general manager Adam Cahan, revises previous versions of its offering that weren’t actually of use to users. Its iPad app now includes:

  • A TV and music syncing function that tells people what songs are playing during a show or during its credits — including covers and live performances — then enables them to watch the music video or buy the song on iTunes.
  • A group chat feature that I guess would resemble your hashtag stream of choice for liveTweeting a show, except within the IntoNow universe. Users can also create recurring conversations for new episodes of the same show.
  • Inclusion of CapIt (similar in spirit if not in coolness to GrabMagic!), enabling users to capture and share imagery straight out of what they’re watching. (Can you imagine the GIF potential?!) You can also add captions to the images (yes, with the Impact font). 

TechCrunch has a cool explanation of how CapIt works: it essentially captures “one image per second of pretty much all the moments that happen on screen, and then holds them for a week.” That’s over 15 million images a day, says Cahan.

What’s cool about these features is that they leverage TV-related activity that users may engage in from one moment to another, then unifies them, making them top-of-mind: hunting down clips on YouTube, livetweeting on Twitter, Amazon-searching the soundtracks or frantically trying to Shazam a scene song that’ll only be playing for the next two seconds. We’d still prefer Twitter show hashtag integration to internal group chat; but with 3 million downloads and counting, maybe the Game of Thrones community we find there will more than suffice.