Now the project is out in the open, and the Zeebox iPad app is live. So what’s it like — and what does it do? Here are my first impressions.

Getting started with Zeebox

You can think of Zeebox as a next-generation TV listings magazine. The app, which only works in the U.K. right now, is based around a simple interface — a list of programs that are on television right now.

The first step once you have downloaded it is to make sure you’re getting the right listings on-screen. In just a few seconds, I told Zeebox my cable provider, the area I live in, and it had what was on TV right then.

The next part of the process is to connect with your friends, logging in through Facebook and/or Twitter to see who else is using the app. Once that’s done, you can scroll through all your available channels and see who is watching what, or see which shows are currently most popular with Zeebox users.

Tapping on a show means you’re watching it — and takes you into a special program page that is packed with information. It has credits for the show itself, a stream of recent Twitter activity based on hashtags, links to apps and downloads related to the program and graphics that show you how popular the show is in real time.

Once you’re watching a show, other friends can see your avatar alongside it on their own listings page. If you see friends online watching a particular program, you can “join them” to indicate you’re watching the same show or start a chat about what it is you’re seeing. It’s swift and simple for the most part.

You’re not just limited to shows that are on right now, either; a quick swipe to the left or right lets you zip around the timeline to see what’s coming up or what you missed.

Here’s a program page for a repeat of the classic Batman TV series that happened to be showing while I was having a play around.

Next-gen remote control

But here’s the big trick that Zeebox has up its sleeve: You can also use it as a remote. That makes it not just a theoretical two-screen experience, but a real one. If you have a compatible internet television — specifically, one of dozens of models produced by Sony, Samsung, Panasonic or LG — you can use Zeebox on your small screen to control what’s happening on your big screen.

That means when you click a show in the app, it flips the channel for you on your television. And if you decide to join a friend to watch a show in Zeebox, your TV will automatically change to the same station. My own television wasn’t compatible, but a friend on the other end of the line reported that it worked well.

Aside from that piece of magic, there are some neat little touches elsewhere, such as the progress bar on each graphic that tells you, in a subtle way, how long each show has left. It’s a well-built, smart and highly usable app.

Even so, however, success won’t be easy. There’s a ton of competition out there.

Services like Miso and GetGlue have built ways of “checking in” to TV programs, and over the last few months alone, we’ve covered the launch of similar services, including BuddyTV, Matcha.tv and Fav.tv. But I get the feeling that Zeebox is in as good a position as any of them, and maybe better: it’s far more useable and sleekly put together than most. And with Rose, it has a CTO who knows this stuff inside out. It reportedly has $5 million in funding too, which is useful.

What Zeebox could do better

Here are a few things Zeebox needs to do if it wants to rise above the crowd.

• New countries. The biggest limitation, of course, is that it’s only serving British television. If Zeebox wants to make a real dent in the market, it’s going to have to crack other geographies as well. Apparently, it’s going to be branching out early next year — something that may be expensive, and may require strong connections with foreign TV providers. But it needs to happen.
• More comprehensive channel lineups. Services like this live and die on the quality of their data. If I have access to a TV channel that isn’t on my Zeebox listing, then it’s useless. When looking with a friend, we noticed that there were a few problems with the EPG data. It was nothing major — outdated logos, for example — but it needs to be totally reliable to catch on.
• TV on demand. We all know that a lot of viewing activity doesn’t happen alongside live TV. It would be interesting to see Zeebox hook into VOD content, or allow you to tell friends that you are watching a catch-up service. It breaks the TV listings model, but it’s where user activity is happening — especially among the sort of market who are likely to be using this app.
• Program stacking. I can look at shows that have just finished, are on right now and are coming next, but I can’t remind myself to watch things that aren’t being shown right now. Nor can I set an alert to tell me whenever one of my friends starts watching one of my favorite shows. Features like that would combine to increase the social viewing experience.
• Better notifications. As far as I could see, when a friend joins me to watch a program, there’s no real indication that I’ve got company. This means it doesn’t quite capture the feeling of all my friends swarming to watch a TV show with me. This could be improved. At the same time, the current hashtag feed from Twitter is interesting, but I’d like to be able to use it like a group chat among everyone who was watching with me — rather than the whole of Twitter.

Overall, it’s early days for Zeebox, and a lot could go wrong. But they have serious ambitions — the slogan is that it’s “the best thing to happen to TV since TV” — and a product that could match up to them.

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But the interesting thing is not just that usage is highest in the evening, which is true of Internet usage as well, but also that mobile use is relatively higher throughout the day than both Internet and TV and eclipsed only by TV in prime time. That shows that mobile app use is incredibly popular, and consistently so, grabbing people’s attention more generally throughout the day. It’s not surprising when you think of mobile devices, which can be used at any moment, unlike TV and to a lesser extent the Internet, which is still accessed mostly in fixed locations with computers. But in comparing the numbers, Flurry is showing that mobile app use is extremely sticky throughout the day, which has some interesting implications for advertisers and developers.

Now, Flurry’s analysis doesn’t compare aggregate numbers of users. It measured usage on a set of mobile apps that reach 15 million iOS and Android users and plotted their relative usage during the day. And then it compared it to day parting data on Internet and TV usage compiled by Michael Zimbalist, the VP of Research for the New York Times. Flurry has a good reason to tout mobile usage numbers, because it can help lure over advertisers, who are still in the process of shifting their budgets to mobile.

If the Flurry numbers are accurate, however, it does show there’s plenty of incentive for advertisers to look at mobile. They can focus on hitting users during prime time and can consider campaigns that are geared toward this part of the day, perhaps in conjunction with TV campaigns, which is something Shazam, Yahoo and others are trying to exploit. But it also means that there is an opportunity to reach users throughout the day more effectively than through the Internet and TV advertising.

Flurry said there are an estimated 110 million iOS and Android devices in use in the U.S. Using the day parting information, that means there are about 33 million consumers, or 30 percent of iOS and Android users, using an application at 10 a.m. And throughout the day, from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., mobile apps reach more than 20 million U.S. consumers per hour.

Again, mobile is still somewhat young, so there are likely more TV and Internet users throughout the day. But with the fast growth of smartphones, it shows that mobile day parting is a ripe opportunity for advertisers. And developers should consider these numbers, too.

As we can see, mobile apps are often used at home in the evening. And it’s likely that just like they do with laptops, people are probably using mobile apps in conjunction with TV viewing. So developers should look at ways to leverage this information and think of how to complement other media, perhaps as a second-screen experience. Many apps can find value in gearing themselves toward the fact that a lot of mobile usage happens in the home. That’s one of the takeaways I had in my talk with Ville Vesterinen, the maker of location-based game Shadow Cities, who found that home and office use were especially high, despite the game revolving around location-awareness.

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In a couple of weeks, the world will reach a milestone: the passing of a decade since the September 11, 2001, attacks that hit New York and Washington, left thousands dead and sparked war around the globe. In advance of that sad anniversary, on Wednesday, San Francisco’s Internet Archive — the nonprofit preservation project run by online pioneer Brewster Kahle — is launching a website that captures the events for posterity.

The Understanding 9/11 site — which features a library of footage taken from a broad range of TV news channels on and after September 11, 2001 — is what the organization calls “a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public.” It’s a comprehensive archive of material, much of it available online for the first time.

What the Internet Archive has achieved is astounding. There are more than 3,000 hours of footage taken from news stations in America and around the world, covering the morning of the attacks and the subsequent week. That includes not only CNN and CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC and Fox but also stations from the UK, Mexico, Iraq, China and beyond.

The site has also compiled a list of analysis pieces that examine the coverage and the events and a video summary of the key moments during the day.

It’s a huge volume of information, but the size isn’t overwhelming; the material is presented in an easy-to-navigate visual style, with each block of programming cut into 10-minute and then 30-second chunks. It makes it easy to sift through to see what actually happened and when.

However easy it is to get around the archive, though, it’s also worth pointing out that this is definitely not easy stuff to watch.

In fact, it’s incredibly difficult to take a look through any of the footage without crying — even for somebody like me, who wasn’t personally affected by the attacks. I didn’t lose any friends, family or colleagues that day, but it’s still dizzying and sickening to be transported backward through the archived programming. Skimming through the timeline of significant events, I alternated between being horrified, dazed, solemn and depressed.

Why now? Why ever?

Given how hard it is to watch, you might ask why this should happen at all. After all, what’s the point of releasing all of this footage and letting people relive those terrible hours all over again?

First, it’s worth pointing out that this initiative is not entirely new. Previous attempts to collate have been published; the Television Archive went live in October 2001; in 2007 the Internet Archive released a limited version of what we see today called the September 11 TV archive.

But the new version is much broader and more ambitious — and in the site’s introduction, the archive explains why it has taken the unprecedented step of compiling this third attempt:

Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.

Today we may think of the web as the main information medium — or at least one with a sort of permanent accessibility — but 9/11 was an experience that was largely shared through television or in person. A decade ago, the Internet was still fairly young, and many popular websites collapsed under the weight of traffic. While the web was useful in helping people cope with their fear and grief (in fact, I wrote about the way things panned out online at the time), it was television that told the big story.

But in spite of television’s important role, the ephemeral nature of television news means that the public is rarely given the chance to go back and examine what actually happened during a major event. Most of the archive footage we see are just tiny glimpses of history: a few snatched seconds of Walter Cronkite announcing the assassination of President Kennedy, Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon, or film of the lone protester at Tiananmen Square, waving his shopping bags at tanks.

So the Internet Archive is trying to use the web as a way of establishing television as a medium of public record — something not just for the broadcasters to dip into but also for ordinary people or observers who want to access living history. It explains more in a blog post.

That means if you are interested in how history unfolds, then it is valuable and important to watch those moments again and understand, remember, what actually happened. It’s important to remember the scale of the panic and see how the immediate response to the events unfolding in the skies of America varied so wildly — both in the moments that they were taking place and in the days afterward as the drumbeat of war began to pound.

Sometimes we forget how dramatically those few days changed the course of history and how rapidly the desire to react was. And as you can see from the footage, it was not just the likes of Bill O’Reilly on Fox News (who declared that America should “bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble”). The archive is a way of digging into that reaction, which is itself a way of digging into where we are today.

But sometimes it’s just as important to remember the sheer confusion that took hold. The most grim moments come when comparing live coverage of the attacks themselves. For example on ABC, at 9:02 a.m., you hear the mangled yelps of staff in the studio as they (and you) watch the second plane strike the World Trade Center. At the same moment on CNN, meanwhile, they didn’t even spot what had happened until a minute or two later. It’s a brief interlude of innocence that nobody will ever have again.

Understanding 9/11 is raw and unpalatable and terrifying. But what the Internet Archive has done is create an important and lasting monument to the events of a decade ago. It might not feel like a traditional tribute to those who died, but I think it is one that — for all of its difficulties — is utterly necessary.

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Users of Netflix’s digital movie-rental service have been up in arms about a sudden change to the company’s pricing plans, which appears to be aimed at reducing demand for its DVD-by-mail service by jacking up prices. In other words, Netflix is trying to manage the transition of users away from the physical product and toward digital streaming. Are there any lessons newspapers and other media companies can learn as they try to move away from the physical print product and toward a digital-only future? Yes and no — publishers shouldn’t get their hopes up too much about copying the Netflix model, because the two businesses are very different.

Media analyst Ken Doctor, author of a book on the news industry called Newsonomics (and a blog by the same name), took a look at the comparisons between the two in a post for the Nieman Journalism Lab. He notes that the obvious impetus for Netflix to change its pricing plans — which effectively penalize people who want both the physical DVD-rental part of the service and the streaming digital part — is to simultaneously generate more revenue that can be applied to the physical parts of its business, and at the same time reduce demand for that product.

The similarities to the traditional news publishing business are pretty obvious. Newspapers and magazines and other print-based entities are also trying to do two things at once: to manage a business that involves a shrink-wrapped physical product that gets shipped to people’s homes — and therefore involves trucks and plants and other expensive things — while trying to simultaneously shift that business into a digital-only product that is far cheaper to produce. Doctor describes Netflix’s rationale for its pricing change:

In the new strategy, we can see how Netflix can both push the digital transition faster and manage the DVD decline better. We can assume that the digital customer is worth more in profit to Netflix than the DVD customer. Then, Netflix wants to take out as much of that cost infrastructure (Post Office, warehouses, associated customer service) as possible, as fast as possible. Differential pricing is one way to do that.

So why don’t newspapers just hike their prices the way Netflix is? Well, the short answer, as Doctor notes, is that they are; many newspapers have boosted their cover and subscription prices by substantial amounts over the past few years. I was in a meeting at one major metropolitan newspaper in which the editor-in-chief bragged about how much the paper had been able to jack up its prices for print subscribers without much backlash. The plan was to just continue to do this until people started cancelling their subscriptions en masse.

In many ways, newspapers are a lot like Microsoft. The software giant is wedded to a shrink-wrapped product that involves huge amounts of revenue for the per-seat licenses it sells for Microsoft Office, and that makes it hard for the company to make a transition to a “cloud-based” model that sees the same services delivered online. Newspapers also get vast amounts of their revenue (as much as 80 percent in some cases) from their print product. How do they give that up as they move to digital only?

But the biggest issue for newspapers and other publishers is something Doctor mentions towards the end of his analysis: namely, that media companies rely on advertising for their bread-and-butter revenue, not subscriptions (which pay for, at best, a small fraction of the cost of a newspaper). The problem with that model is that online advertising produces a tiny fraction of the amount of revenue per reader that print does — up to 10 times less, in some cases. While some newspapers such as John Paton’s Journal-Register have committed to trying to make this transition from “print dimes to digital pennies” work, there’s no proven method for doing so.

So while Doctor says the future of print is “price increase after price increase,” as publishers try to force readers to make the transition to digital-only, the biggest stumbling block isn’t the behavior of users the way it is with Netflix; it’s the behavior of advertisers. Until they decide to start paying dramatically more for online ads than they have in the past — something that isn’t likely to happen — traditional publishers can only look at Netflix’s model with envy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Shironeko Euro and Si Brindley

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The addition of Hastings to Facebook’s boardroom is the latest signal of the Palo Alto, California-based social networking giant’s growing focus on the entertainment industry.

Although Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has asserted that he has no plans to turn his company into a music of movie studio, the company is clearly keen to become more of a media hub. As Om Malik reported here earlier this week, Facebook is planning to add a new “music” tab to users’ homepages that will lead to a full “music dashboard” where users will be able to stream, play and share songs. Last week, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts unveiled his company’s new integration with Facebook, an application that adds social networking features directly onto the television user interface. And earlier this year, Netflix began rolling out its own Facebook integration, which allows users to connect their Facebook and Netflix accounts.

Along with Zuckerberg and Hastings, Facebook’s board is comprised of Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz; Jim Breyer of Accel Partners; Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company; and Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Reed Hastings is not purely an entertainment executive. Netflix as a company takes a lot of pride in its technical operations, and Hastings himself has a ton of tech cred: a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, a long history in the software industry, and a current seat on Microsoft’s board of directors. Facebook, which has made no secret of its plans to IPO, may have also brought Hastings on board for his public market prowess. As founder and CEO, Hastings has led two companies through initial public offerings: Pure Software in 1995 and Netflix in 2002.

One thing is sure: Netflix and Hastings certainly have solid footing in the entertainment, technology and financial worlds. It appears Facebook is looking to strike a similar balance.

Photo is of Reed Hastings on stage at NewTeeVee Live 2009 in San Francisco.

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Here are a few early surprises and observations from CES 2010:

Image courtesy CNET

Toshiba Cell TV: Based on the multicore Cell processor developed by Toshiba, IBM and Sony and used in PlayStation 3, the new high-end line of HDTVs from Toshiba has a number of other neat tricks up its sleeve as well. Among them: Upconverting native SD TV content to 1080p HD. While upconversion is old hat in Blu-ray and DVD players, Cell TV is the first commercially available HDTV to upconvert non-packaged media on the fly.  That squealing you hear is coming from cable and satellite operators whose high-def digital tiers just got new competition. Added bonus: Cell TV also upconverts crummy Internet-delivered video.

Image courtesy OhGizmo!

Qualcomm Mirasol display: We’ve seen static mockups before but the unit on display here is a working prototype and it looks great. Unlike E-Ink’s black-and-white e-paper displays, the Mirasol reflective screen can display rich colors. It’s high refresh rate also allows it to support video, all while consuming very little power. Qualcomm says an e-reader with a Mirasol display will be commercially available in the U.S. before the end of the year but wouldn’t identify its partner. Whoever it is will have an opportunity to make a splash with digital newspaper and magazine publishers, who crave graphic capability not available on the Kindle or Nook. Advertisers will love the color and the ability to do click-through ads. A potential game-changer.

Image courtesy mydigitallife.info

Netflix is now a utility: Netflix has been embedding its streaming app on CE devices for a year or more. But it’s clear from the devices on display here that the app has become de rigueur on anything with an Ethernet port. Virtually every connected TV, Blu-ray player and broadband-enabled set-top box here has it.

Image courtesy coated.com

Cisco vs. Skype: LG and Panasonic showed an embedded Skype app on WiFi-connected HDTVs, bringing video calling into the living room. But something of a VoIP TV format war may be brewing between Skype and Cisco, which demoed its TelePresence videoconferencing platform for the home. All of a sudden there are two ways of doing video calling from your couch, and HDTV makers will have to decide which to embed.

Streaming video: 3D is supposed to be the big video story here but some of the most interesting announcements have been about streaming plain old 2D video to HDTVs and other connected devices. Announcements by Vudu, DivX and Rovi suggest an explosion coming in embedded streaming applications and streaming video channels coming to connected devices. Forget widgets — full UIs and streaming video program guides are becoming the new standard.

Editor’s Update: Also at CES, AT&T announced that it will be launching five Android handsets in the first half of 2010, as well as two handsets based on Palm’s WebOS.

At jkOnTheRun, you can also read about new wireless charging developments at CES, The new Palm Pre Plus and Pixi phones–exclusive to Verizon, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer’s keynote address, Samsung’s ebook device,  HTC’s new phones, and HP’s new netbooks and notebooks.

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