Yahoo reinvents TV-tagging app IntoNow, releases it on the iPad

Television-tagging application IntoNow has launched for the iPad, and it now matches tagged content to real-time news and updates, parent company Yahoo announced today at a press event in Sunnyvale.

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IntoNow is the iPhone and Android application that uses patented technology to listen to and identify millions of television and movie titles, in a similar fashion to how Shazam identifies music. The technology originated at Auditude, but the app was spun out as its own entity. Yahoo acquired IntoNow in April 2011, just 12 weeks after the then nascent startup launched its iPhone app in the App Store.

Available for free on the App Store, IntoNow for iPad is designed to engage the multitasking television viewer. It tags live and time-shifted broadcast television content, highlights related content, and recommends television shows and movies based on your tagging behaviors and preferences.

The app’s most compelling feature, however, is its ability to discover and feature real-time content — in the form of tweets, news headlines or play-by-play sports updates — related to what the user is watching.

IntoNow for iPad, explained product manager Adam Cahan in a demonstration of the application, is taking closed captioning data and analyzing it using Yahoo Core technology, the company’s personalization and optimization engine. It then works to understand show content and context, matches that information against current news items, and surfaces results in the right-hand sidebar of the application.

Cahan referred to the process as ambient-style computing, and said that IntoNow will focus on this technology to better answer the question of “what’s next?” in the second-screen entertainment environment.

IntoNow had close to 600,000 users and was averaging 25,000 to 35,000 tags per day prior to being acquired by Yahoo. Cahan disclosed that, to date, IntoNow has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times on Android phones and iOS devices.