What's App

Shazam Asks Users 'What's That TV Show?" With Show-Tagging Functionality

Jonathan Charles

Popular music-tagging app Shazam, which answered the common question of "what's that song?", revealed that it now boasts 250 million app users, making Shazam one of the top ten most-used apps of all time. 

"Each week we get more than two million users. People think it's magical. But the reason people come back is because there's an amazing degree of utility," Shazam's Chief Revenue Officer Doug Garland said following the announcement.

The company also announced that users now have the ability to tag television shows. Along with being able to tag music played in TV shows, the app will also provide IMDB information on the show's actors, trivia (show facts), tweets about the show, and collected headlines. Sports events can also be tagged, showing the score and statistics on the game. Shazam previously offered the functionality for sponsored TV shows and the bigger sporting events, like the 2012 London Olympics, and Super Bowl XLVI.

"According to our industry studies, 86% of smartphone owners use their mobile devices their while watching TV and, with our expansion into television, we've seen a surge of activity due to recent Shazam-enabled events such as the NBC Olympics broadcast, where more than one tagged the closing ceremony, as well as the US Open tennis grand slam event on CBS earlier this month. We think that broadening our television service and offering more comprehensive social features will continue to drive activity and engagement," Fisher added.

The new functionality will support over 160 TV channels, though only select local broadcasts, in the U.S. That includes cable and satellite TV. Worldwide support was not discussed.

It remains to be seen how the new functionality performs in real-word usage. The problem with Shazam now is that identifying music with background noise results in no recognised music. It would seem using the app with a TV show amplifies the problem.

Shazam is available on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon's App Store, AT&T's AppCenter, Verizon's VCast app store, the Nokia Store, the Windows Phone marketplace, BlackBerry App World, and GetJar.

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