What happened?

Have you ever found yourself shouting at your TV whilst watching a football match alone? Or, if you’re like me, watching Made in Chelsea and yearning to gab with your girlfriends about Millie’s awful outfit? If this sounds familiar, then you need to hear about zeebox.

Zeebox is a new company that’s dedicated to improving your television experience by amalgamating the power of the internet with your TV, all whilst enabling you to socialise with your friends. The notion behind the innovation is to create a more engaging TV-viewing experience, whilst incorporating a new social media aspect to an often lonesome activity.

The zeebox team, based in London, have created a free app that can be connected with your TV via your laptop, iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone. Zeebox can also be used as a social tool by instantaneously providing you with information on what your friends are watching and what shows are the most popular, in real-time. It’s the perfect combination of leisure and entertainment.

The revolutionary aspect of the zeebox is that by simply inviting your friends to join you, it enables you to share content with them, and can chat about programmes together while you watch them. Zeebox is also integrated with Twitter, so you can keep your followers up-to-date as you watch.

As you watch your favourite shows and films, zeebox recognises references to people, places and topics, and puts them up as keyword tags, or “zeetags”, on your screen. All you have to do is click on the zeetag and the machine brings up search results on Wikipedia, Google, or anywhere else on the web. Plus, if your TV is connected to the internet, zeebox can also act as your remote control.

To top it all off, you can also identify products that are related to what you’re watching and purchase them immediately online. This enables viewers to shop in real-time and increases the relevence of product placement in movies and television shows.

This short video from the company founders shows this clever TV sidekick in action.

Why we like it

Zeebox’s integrated social features enable the user to do an impressive number of social and technological tasks, easily and efficiently. By pulling in content on the spot from the internet, zeebox instantly provides you with a vast amount of information that’s easy to navigate. Thanks to this connected portal of information, zeebox is expected to become part of the standard TV-viewing experience in the not-so-distant future – hence why BSkyB decided to take a 10% stake in the company at the beginning of this year.

So, if zeebox is to lead the way for the companion app revolution in TV, and connected TV lives up to its expectations, then TV viewing will never be the same. It is incredibly important for brands to take note of this, as the implications are wide-reaching. The usual television advertisement will lose its relevance and brands will have to move to a more product placement and ad-funded programming orientated strategy to ensure their products get the desired cut-through. This is very exciting, as we will start to move from passive TV consumption to a more active experience in which brands can play an important role.

This, together with the seamless combination of rich information and social channels in one place, brings a sense of excitement that the way we consume television is about to change forever, and that zeebox is one of the catalysts for this change.

And the best part about it: it’s available now.

By Synergy on May 31st, 2012

Tags: Blogging, Branded content, Communications, Content, Digital marketing, Facebook, Media, Mobile, Online communities, Social Media, Synergy Loves, Viral Marketing, YouTube

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