- Interface
- Functionality
- Usability
- Fun Factor
- Value for money
What is Zeebox? Zeebox is a fun (free!) new social way to experience TV using your iPad. According to their website zeebox is “the new way to watch television. It’s social, connecting you to your TV-watching friends, so you can chat, share and tweet about whatever’s on. And it’s clever – helping you find out more about anything you’re watching with links (zeetags) popping up instantly as you watch. Amazing.“
It does exactly what it says on the tin. You boot up the app, login via facebook, tell it what reigon you’re in and what TV service provider you use (freeview, sky etc) and thats about it.
You can then see what’s on the box in a ‘now & next’ fashion and see what all your facebook friends are watching (providing they are also using the zeebox app). Simply tap to state you’re viewing a show and once you’re in the show view, you can see what people are tweeting and other stats like the amount of current viewers. You can also chat with your facebook friends from here and the app pumps out ‘zeetags’ which are real time references to whats happening right there on the screen.
When I gave it a whirl I was watching some cooking show and a chocolate dish was mentioned so it appeared as a zeetag, I could click it and the app sourced various facts and infobits about ‘chocolate’ I could even read an excerpt from wikipedia or launch it fully in safari. The app also displays links to products you can buy, if you like a song that one of the X-Factor contestants are butchering you will be able to purchase the original through itunes via the app, it really does know and react to what is happening on the screen.
It gets better, if you have a smartTV (one that connects to your home network) the app is compatible with a slew of TV’s to be used as a remote. I tried to set this up on my Samsung (LE40C750) so I hooked up the TV via ethernet, booted up the app and instantly it gave me a notification to say there was a compatible TV on the network. A quick authentication message later and I was able to channel hop from the iPad, I couldn’t believe it was that simple!
Overall the app is elegant and really easy to set-up and start using. It works great and it achieves its goals very well, the only downside I found was from the social aspect of the app (seeing what your friends are watching) as it is strictly tied to Facebook. There is twitter integration so you can tweet from the app but I would prefer to have the option to see what my twitter friends/followers are watching as I’m not a heavy Facebook user.
I also have my TV set-up with a custom channels list and the app doesn’t have the ability to also create a custom channels list so some of the mappings were off when using the app as a remote. I have been told by the zeebox team that this is something they could be looking at in the new year to accommodate international markets.
Zeebox is currently only available in the UK and can be downloaded from the iTunes app store for free.
