Dijit launched an iPad version of NextGuide last summer, aiming to reinvent the traditional TV guide with universal search for movies and TV content across live TV and iPad apps from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and others. Users of the app can also define searches for very specific interests and get recommendations for any content related to their hobby or their hometown.

It all makes sense – but I just don’t find myself frequenting the iPad app very much. Maybe it’s the fact that I just don’t feel like I don’t have enough choices for things to watch. Maybe it’s due to my binge viewing habits: while I’m burning through a new show (mind you, burning a very relative term if you have a job and a family), I  don’t look for much else, and don’t need to know what’s on. Or maybe it’s just that the app is a bit too complicated for its own good.

But there’s something about NextGuide’s new web app sibling that is very intriguing. For one thing, it is a lot simpler than the iPad app, and it feels less like you have to turn thousand nobs before you get good results.

But the app also feels a lot more social, thanks to its Facebook integration: Users can easily browse the movies and TV shows any of their Facebook friends have liked on the social network, no matter whether these contacts are using NextGuide or not. The results are displayed in a Pinterest-like fashion, inviting you to aimlessly browse around and check out what your friends like to watch.

Once you find something that catches your interest, you’re able to see which services it is playing on, add it to your own Watchlist or subscribe to email alerts to be notified when new episodes are available online, or on the air. Essentially, it turns your friends’ Facebook likes into your TV guide, and that’s pretty cool. Oh, and you can also compile a list of your own favorites to display to the world.

Pre-populating a video discovery service with data from Facebook certainly isn’t new – but there’s something about this kind of Pinterest-like approach that just invites browsing. And TV fans will appreciate that their friends’ likes, which are otherwise scattered on Facebook, are all brought together in one place.

Sure, there’s still room to improve NextGuide on the web. Recommending the right resources to play content is one of those things. For example, for a show like the Daily Show, it only recommends Hulu, Amazon and iTunes, even though full episodes are also available on the show’s website.

But even with those shortcomings, I have to say that I enjoyed playing with the website, and I can see myself coming back to it much more often than to the app.

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NextGuide isn’t Dijit’s first stab at this space. The company first launched its remote control app, dubbed Dijit and capable of controlling TVs and set-top boxes through a custom IR blaster, last summer. It added some basic social programming guide functionality to Dijit earlier this year, and the company signed up more than 100,000 users. Still, Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman told me recently that he never saw it take off, and so the company realized that it had to refocus.

One key lesson learned with the Dijit app was that remote control functionality wasn’t used as much as the team initially thought. That’s why NextGuide squarely focuses on content recommendations. The app pulls in social data from Facebook and recommends content to you in a variety of channels, with the ability to add and customize the channels you’re interested in most, and even combine various filters. Only want live TV results about dogs in your home city? NextGuide can deliver.

There is also a time grid that mixes live and on-demand recommendations, which can be a bit confusing: It’s not easily understandable why NextGuide would recommend one Netflix title Thursday at 9 p.m. and another Friday at noon. Toeman acknowledged that the personalization could still be improved.

What’s interesting about NextGuide is that it’s not your classic throwing old ideas out of the window and starting over from scratch move. Instead, NextGuide and Dijit are joined by the hip: Dijit logins work on both apps, and comments posted on one of them are also displayed on the other.

Of course, NextGuide isn’t the first company to take a stab at the next-generation TV guide. Fanhattan, Peel, Boxfish and a bunch of others are also trying to apply new ideas to content recommendations on the second screen, and TVGuide.com itself recently published an app that tries to combine the traditional grid guide with more personalized recommendations. Still, NextGuide definitely looks interesting, and the personalized channel idea might just be what the company needs to succeed the second time around.

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But TV is changing, and so is the way people are consuming it, regardless of whether they’re San Francisco hipsters or families in rural Texas. Netflix now has 24 million subscribers in the U.S., and more and more families are using multiple devices to access TV shows, with the iPad quickly becoming everyone’s favorite on-demand screen.

TVGuide.com’s Christy Tanner: The Marissa Mayer of social TV?

And with that, Tanner has a problem that’s a bit like the one Mayer is facing at Yahoo now: How do you evolve while the world changes around you without scaring away your huge legacy user base? Tanner has been doing this by keeping the traditional grid that most people associate with a brand like TV Guide alive, even though many TV startup founders  tend to mock it. Instead of throwing it out altogether, she is augmenting it with the Watchlist, a personalized guide that first launched on TVGuide.com a year ago and has since been used by 500,000 people.

This week, the Watchlist is coming to the TV Guide iOS app, which now also features in-app links to content on iTunes, HBO Go and Hulu Plus. The Watchlist also allows users to check into shows and keep track of the episodes they’ve already seen, and there are some basic social sharing and commenting features – but don’t expect too many bells and whistles. Instead of social activity streams, the app emphasizes TV and celebrity gossip.

“News is our social feature,” said Tanner when she stopped by our office to demonstrate the app earlier this week. In other words: The app gives people something to talk about instead of making the conversation itself the centerpiece.

That doesn’t mean that Tanner’s team ignores what other social TV startups are up to. A third of TVGuide.com’s 66-strong team are engineers, and Tanner recently aqui-hired the developers of the social TV guide Fav.tv. “We are really hands-on in the way we build our things,” she explained.

That also means that the team is constantly evaluating new developments in areas like synched second-screen experiences and remote control functionality. But unlike others, Tanner doesn’t want to roll out experiments with select partners, which would limit functionality to just one type of DVR or one set-top-box from one satellite provider. “We need to be comprehensive,” she told me, adding: “It’s a lot harder to execute at scale.”

Still, Tanner wants to eventually add more social and second-screen functionality to her mobile apps, and considers the newly rolled out iOS app a first step. “We are definitely going to integrate automatic content recognition functionality within the next six to nine months,” she told me. One of the first areas could be synchronized ads. Said Tanner: “That’s going to come very soon.”

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Here is how it works: Boxfish takes the the closed captions from 3,600 cable and local broadcast stations all over the U.S. and indexes and analyses all this data in real time. The result is presented as a constantly updating stream of trends and topics – think Tweetdeck, but for live TV.

Boxfish presents updates from the world of sports, news, business and celebrity gossip by default as part of its live feed. It also surfaces trending topics, which at the time of writing included Paul Ryan, Medicare and Chad Johnson. Users can customize the app by adding their own favorite channels to take a quick glance at what’s being talked about on CNBC or ESPN at any given time. And the app can be synched with a TiVo or a DirecTV set-top box to help users change the channel every time they want to tune into a conversation. However, there’s no esy way to filter out channels that a subscriber doesn’t have access to.

Check out a few screenshots of the app, or continue reading below:

Boxfish co-founder and CEO Eoin Dowling told me during a Skype chat Monday that his team initially set out to build a kind of Google for TV shows, allowing users to search for content through captions. But once it started testing its technology with users, it realized that the search engine analogy was all wrong: Early testers weren’t interested in complicated searches. “They were using TV as a live stream,” said Dowling. In other words: Less like Google, and more like Twitter.

I’ve had a chance to play with Boxfish a little bit over the last couple of hours, and gotta say that the app is definitely intriguing. Yes, it can seem a little bit overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to catch up on popular topics.

But the basic idea behind it is very clever: Dowling and his co-founder Kevin Burkitt told me that only about 60 percent of your average TV viewing time is spent on shows and movies you don’t want to miss. The other 40 percent is about tuning in, trying to catch up on news and just randomly flipping through channels, looking for something new. That’s the 40 percent Boxfish is after. “TV does a terrible job giving you new content,” said Burkitt.

So what’s next for Boxfish? The duo told me that it has an iPhone app more or less ready, but wants to collect feedback from iPad users first before releasing it. It also plans to release apps for Android and even smart TV platforms, but eventually wants to give others access to its treasure trove of indexed captions through an API as well. “It’s really interesting data – and there is only so much we can do with it,” said Downling.

Boxfish was founded in 2010 in London, and the founders moved to the Bay Area in 2011. The company raised a $3 million Series A round, which was led by T-Venture, and the team currently consists of 10 people.

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We first reported about Fav.tv last July, and the site officially launched in September. In a way it has been a very traditional TV programming guide, focusing first and foremost on major broadcast and cable network. The site allows users to follow their favorite shows and get notifications when new episodes air, and has impressed with its clean design and simplicity. Tanner said Friday that Fav.tv will go offline in a few weeks, and existing users will be encouraged to join TVGuide.com’s own personalized programming guide, known as the Watchlist.

TVGuide.com launched its Watchlist feature last August, and Tanner told me that 450,000 people have created their own personal lineup so far. She said that the Fav.tv team will help to make the Watchlist a central part of TVGuide.com’s mobile experience, both through apps and on the web.

“TVGuide.com’s mobile business has been growing really rapidly,” Tanner said, explaining that the company sees some 1.5 million active users per month for its mobile app and web offerings.

What to make of a major publisher like TVGuide.com doubling down on mobile video curation? Even if the business has faced its own troubles (it has changed hands numerous times over the past 10 years, the parent company was sold for $1 in 2008 and is now owned by movie and TV company Lionsgate), it’s something that should worry many of the smaller startups. Tanner definitely wasn’t shy about the power a brand like TVGuide.com has in the market. One example: Foursquare-style check-ins for TV shows.

Startups like Miso and Getglue may have been getting a lot of coverage for their check-in functionality in 2011, but TVGuide.com succeeded in selling it to more than 80 advertisers, making it one of the few companies that has actually made money with social TV.

“It’s been profitable and contributed millions of dollars in 2011,” Tanner said.

Correction: TV Guide the magazine sold for $1; the website and the other TV Guide properties actually sold for $255 million in 2009.

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The new app will launch sometime in the first quarter of 2012, Iskold said, and it will feature a lot more options to interact with content on the second screen while watching TV. One example: GetGlue wants to serve up “interviews with stars or clips that didn’t make it” into a TV show, Iskold explained. Some of that data will be crowdsourced, while other resources may come directly from TV networks. GetGlue is now partnering with 75 TV networks in the U.S. and the U.K., and plans to add more partners in Latin America later this year.

The company relaunched its iPhone and web apps Wednesday, and Android is next in line for a new coat of paint. However, don’t expect your Kindle Fire or Android tablet to get the same kind of love the iPad is going to receive with the next update. Iskold told me that GetGlue is supporting Android tablets with its current app, but that there are no tablet-specific plans for Android in store: “We are not in the business of building customized apps for every platform,” he said. Oh snap!

GetGlue started off with pure Foursquare-like check-ins for media content, but the company has been moving towards curating conversations around media, and especially TV in recent months. Part of that has also been an effort to channel conversations around a show that isn’t necessarily watched at the same time by everyone. New data from GetGlue shows that only 35 percent of its users watch a show live, but 70 percent tune in later the same or the following day.

GetGlue also announced a new $12 million round of financing Wednesday, which is led by Rho Ventures. Existing investors Time Warner, RRE Ventures, and Union Square Ventures, from which the company raised $6 million in November of 2010, are all part of this round as well.

GetGlue has now around 40 people on staff, and plans to grow its headcount in 2012. Iskold told me he hopes for social TV to become mainstream within the next 24 months, and he wants the company’s upcoming iPad app to be a big part of that. “A lot of really interesting things are happening on the second screen,” he said.

Update: A GetGlue spokesperson told us that the company is in fact working on an app for Android tablets as well.

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The TVGuide.com Fall 2011 survey generated more than 5,800 responses from TVGuide.com’s 10,000-member research panel and is being released today at paidContent Entertainment in LA. According to Christy Tanner, EVP and GM of TV Guide Digital, the panel’s demos and habits usually correlate with mass market general studies and tend to reflect the general U.S. population.

Overall, it found that the number of people watching more than 30 hours of TV per week (that’s more than four hours per day) has rocketed up to 32 percent of the population, a rise of 14 percent over the last year. In general, 93 percent of respondents said they were watching more than before.

That growth is largely coming from the rise of new technology, with some 55 percent of users said that they are watching TV online. The amount of time that people are spending watching online is growing fast: 15 percent of people are watching six or more hours of online video per week these days, a big spike on the four percent a year ago. Overall some 62 percent said they were watching for more hours than before.

That could be a reflection of user habits, but it’s also a testament to the growing amount of content that is available for them to view: the rise of services from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), as well as the existing offerings from the likes of Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Hulu, will be joined by more programming offerings from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) — giving users potentially a far richer catalog of content via the internet than they have through their traditional TV sets.

That’s not to say that TV-based viewing is disappearing, but it is shifting — time-shifting, that is… Some 71 percent of respondents said they were watching more time-shifted content, using their own DVRs or those from their pay-TV providers, than they were a year ago.

Time (NYSE: TWX) shifting has been great news for those of us who are not able to keep to the timetables set by networks, but as many expected would happen, the technology is also leading to another inevitable problem: decreasing attention being paid to advertising.

An astounding 96 percent of respondents say they fast-forward through ads on DVR content these days — although some 44 percent did point out that they “don’t mind” ads as a general rule. Still, the number of people skipping ads on time-shifted content, and that growth of time-shifted content consumption seem set for some kind of collision course in the future.

Ad industry aside, there are other business models emerging to finance content and make revenues as a content owner: the survey revealed that 19 percent are paying more for their TV content than before, and that model is also translating to the growth of online and streamed video content: some 34 percent said that they pay for these.

But even so, the big challenge remains: how do premium providers get people to pay when there is so much on offer that is free? The survey showed that some 81 percent watch streaming and online services for “free” (not counting their broadband bills), even if 69 percent also use paid content or subscription services.

And pay-TV providers have opportunities in enabling new services like time-shifting to viewers. Today, 41 percent are paying for time-shifted viewing, although it’s not clear from the survey whether that represents much growth over the last year.

Just as technologies are enabling new kinds of consumption habits, new devices are also having a big impact on usage.

Tablets present one of the biggest opportunities for TV consumption — with their large screens and improved processing power, they have effectively taken the place of the smartphone as the key wireless TV device. (The smartphone, of course, does drive lot of video usage but it has not proven to be the ubiquitous TV-viewing device that everyone thought it could or would become by now.)

The survey found that 27 percent of consumers planned to buy a tablet in the next year, and that the iPad is still the device of choice — 77 percent said they would get Apple’s tablet if price weren’t a factor. That could leave the door open for the cheaper alternatives out there, such as the new Kindle Fire from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). The survey notes that 30 percent said they were likely to buy a Kindle Fire, with 47 percent like to buy the iPad.

And two endnotes that alternately point to a challenge ahead, and a big opportunity for those opting for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) product universe to distribute their TV content: only 14 percent of respondents knew what Ultraviolet was, while 44 percent recognized the term “iCloud.”

Full slide deck below:

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A user survey conducted by TV Guide has 15 percent of respondents saying they watch more than six hours of online video a week. Last year, that number was still at four percent. Sixty-two percent of all respondents said they watch more online video than just a year ago.

Of course, TV Guide’s user survey is somewhat self-selective, which is why it’s interesting that a study by advertising specialist Burst Media has even more impressive numbers: The Burst Media Online Insights survey (PDF) has the number of people who tune in online for more than six hours a week at close to 30 percent. Almost three percent even profess watching more than 24 hours of online video per week!

TV Guide’s survey, which will be presented at the paidContent Entertainment conference in Los Angeles Thursday, also shows that a lot of that growth can be attributed to professional content. Fifty-five percent of the respondents said they tune in to their favorite shows online. That’s also echoed by the Burst Media survey, albeit with slightly weaker numbers. Burst’s survey has 39.1 percent of Internet users watching TV content online, with 49.7 percent watching user-generated content.

And finally, two-screen activity continues to grow as well. Burst Media says a third of online viewers now “often” use the Internet while watching TV.

Image courtesy of Flickr user julianlimjl.

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Gathering around the social media watercooler

“Word of mouth has always been a major component in building awareness and interest in TV programs,” CBS research chief David Poltrack told us in a phone interview. Ensuring that people watch a show at least once is a key component to ensuring that they convert to being a loyal viewer in the future. But the world has changed over the last several decades, Poltrack notes: Whereas in 1980, the average new broadcast TV show was seen by half the population by November, the growing number of cable networks and entertainment choices means that now only about 15 percent of people see new shows in the same time period.

Most word of mouth still occurs in face-to-face situations around the company watercooler or talking to friends, but social media has emerged as a powerful tool for networks to get the word out about their shows. Even so, until now there’s been some debate about how effective social media actually is in creating a ratings lift for shows.

The correlation and causation of social TV success

For its part, Nielsen and NM Incite have been trying to chart the correlation between social activity and TV ratings. They released the following graph, which was compiled by analyzing the relationship between social media and television for 250 television programs and more than 150 million social media sites. The results show that activity on social media sites can help provide a lift to shows, especially when the word of mouth starts early.

Nielsen SVP of Media Analytics Radha Subramanyam summarizes the results as follows:

“Among people aged 18-34, the most active social networkers, social media buzz is most closely aligned with TV ratings for the premiere of a show. A few weeks prior to a show’s premiere, a nine percent increase in buzz volume correlates to a one percent increase in ratings among this group. As the middle of the season approaches and then the finale, the correlation is slightly weaker, but still significant, with a 14 percent increase in buzz corresponding to a one percent increase in ratings.”

Not every social success is a ratings success

That correlation between pre-premiere buzz and actual viewership could help explain the early success of New Girl, the new Fox sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel. Prior to its airing, the network created a lot of buzz for its premiere by releasing the pilot on Apple’s iTunes, Hulu, Fox.com and through Klout Perks several weeks prior to its airing. And that buzz has paid off in the form of ratings: New Girl has consistently topped all other scripted shows on Tuesday nights.

But not everyone is convinced that social media is a savior for TV shows.

“Social changes how shows are marketed,” Christy Tanner, general manager of TVGuide.com, said in a phone interview. “But it needs to be more than just adding a Twitter hashtag to the screen.” That also doesn’t mean that all social campaigns are successful: While some programs — like NBC’s The Voice — clearly benefitted from Twitter or Facebook activity, Tanner noted that there are plenty of examples in which shows that are extremely popular on social networks have actually seen their ratings drop.

Take Glee, for example: Although it still consistently draws more social buzz than any other scripted show week after week, its ratings have been down significantly in the early fall season.

But social is here to stay

Even so, Poltrack said the combination of social media and streaming catch-up episodes online is creating a new immediacy in the ability to learn about and become fans of new shows that wasn’t previously available. “If the conversation is on the Internet instead of in the workplace, you can immediately go and find that show,” he said. That compares to the past, when viewers might have heard about a new program but would have had to wait a week to check it out. “There’s an advantage to being very quick as opposed to the slower process of word of mouth.”

With more programming than ever fighting for attention, you can bet that even more networks will be looking to use that combination as a way to get viewers hooked.

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