Shazam for TV has grown tremendously over the past year. The platform has figured out how to attract television advertisers and has launched partnerships with major television events like the Olympics. Today they’re announcing that they’ve reached over 250 million users worldwide and are launching the ability to Shazam any TV show in the U.S. We spoke with Jason Titus, the company’s CTO about this big achievement.
According to their annoucement, “now, Shazam fans can use the app as a ‘TV companion app’ with any TV show in the U.S. to access cast details and photos, music in the show, celebrity gossip, trivia, celebrity tweets, and links to additional information, plus the ability to instantly share and comment on the show or episode on Facebook and Twitter.” The next year will prove if Shazam’s already built in user base can help them own social TV users’ second screen needs. The new features will be available for iOS and Android.
The ability to Shazam all US TV, “is an extension of our core technology,” Titus told Lost Remote. “Avery [Wang] our Chief Scientist worked closely to build the same world class audio recognition, to bring to live television,” he added. Describing how the technology will work he said that “we see it as having the same high performance, noise tolerant,” capabilities that they’ve have for music recognition. He added that “we expect to be at the same range, 5 seconds and you should know,” what TV show you’re watching.
If you’re worried that the new capabilities will prevent you from discovering music while you’re watching TV rest assured, that will not be the case. When you’re trying to Shazam a song on TV you’ll still be able to discover it, in addition to more content about the show. Titus described how “in the case of Olympics, we knew there would be a fair amount of music and made sure people could pre-order the Olympic music CD.” Their growth in TV will only make it easier to discover music on TV.
They’ve also grown the social features within Shazam. “We encourage you to connect to Facebook and share your activity,” Titus told Lost Remote. “We’ve definitely been seeing a strong and continued rise of activity on Facebook and in the near term there will be in-app commenting,” to grow the social activity within Facebook.
This major update to the app comes just as the iPhone 5 gets closer and closer to shipping. “Our expectation is that within days of anyone having an iPhone 5,” the app will be updated, Titus told Lost Remote. Here’s an infographic displaying their growth.
