Some of the app’s functionality may seem familiar: second-screen apps like Zeebox have been offering discovery through their apps for some time, and apps like Peel even offer some control capability when paired with the right hardware. But there are two things that stand out with Dish’s app, and they have a lot to do with what Dish brings to the table in the second screen space:

Dish’s second-screen app makes use of data from Trendrr and Thuutz.

First, Dish doesn’t have to rely on automated content recognition to find out what’s on TV, simply because Dish already knows what you’re watching. The company is running your set-top-box, after all. So no more ugly workarounds that require your tablet to listen to your TV’s audio, only to tell you with a notable delay what’s on TV.

Secondly, Dish is making some good use of third-party providers for some of the media and social smarts used in the app. The company is relying on sports data from Thuutz to tell viewers which of the currently airing games are the most exciting ones. And it’s making extensive use of data from Trendrr to gather social sentiment across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and others, which makes it possible to show which shows are “hot” on social networks. The reason for this is obvious: Dish doesn’t have to reinvent TV discovery services, because that’s not where the money is for the company. So it can rely on third parties to make its own product better.

Which brings up an interesting question: If an operator like Dish can build a second-screen app without any of the complicated hoops that some of its start-up competitors have to jump through, then why should consumers install a third-party app? Sure, some of the apps built by startups may look hipper and come with a few more bells and whistles, but really, will consumers care?

Or will they just go for what’s good enough, and sure to work with their in-home setup?

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Zeebox is a second-screen app that allows users to discover TV programming on their iPads, change the channels on their TV sets and receive additional content on the second screen. The company uses a combination of video content recognition and natural language processing to analyze currently airing shows on any of the 80 or so U.K. TV networks that Zeebox users can receive on their TV sets.

To do so, it has built a network of aerial receivers that ingest broadcast TV and then analyze closed captions. “We know what’s playing second-by-second,” Rose said. This enables the company to eventually deliver second-screen advertising similar to the way Google is selling contextual ads matched against the content of a web site or search results page. Users could, for example, see an ad for a soft drink whenever it is mentioned in any TV show – whether that mention was originally sponsored or not.

Zeebox will be met with high expectations in the U.S., in part because of its executive team: Rose was once the CTO of file sharing app maker Kazaa and later became the online controller of the BBC, overseeing the design and launch of the broadcaster’s popular iPlayer.

The company also hired former Time Warner executive Jason Forbes in March to lead the U.S. expansion, and he revealed on Wednesday at TV of Tomorrow that the company has seen one million app downloads in the U.K. since its launch last November. Forbes said that this rate of adoption should make it possible to get six million U.S. users within the first half year of operating stateside.

For more on Zeebox, check out Bobbie Johnson’s review of the company’s iPad app.

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But even so, not everyone is a fan. Some program makers are cutting their support for smart platforms — and now other industry insiders are turning on it too.

“When smart TVs came out I was really quite enthused by it all,” Anthony Rose, the co-founder of hot social TV app Zeebox — and a former head of the BBC’s iPlayer project — told me over the weekend. “But that enthusiasm really has declined for me, because they have failed to embrace what technology can offer.”

He thinks that making TVs ape computers by adding apps and proprietary controls and interfaces has caused a war between manufacturers and broadcasters that has “halted innovation.”

“You can buy your beautiful, new connected TV, and you can either be in the one area that watches live TV, or, 18 clicks later, you can be in the app store and do something else — and no one ever goes to the app store,” he said. “On my iPad it takes about 60 seconds for zero cost to be trying some new application.

“I think innovation will flourish here and that in the future your TV will be a beautiful but dumb hi-res panel that will play the content it is told to by your smartphone or tablet.”

Follow the money

The comments were made during a panel I moderated at MIPCube, a television and technology industry conference in Cannes, France.

Focused on the question of where the emerging investment trends were in this area, the answers from the panelists — Rose was joined by Ralph Eric Kunz of Catagonia Capital, an investor in German video discovery app Tweek.tv — came loud and clear.

While many are still focused on the disruption of distribution, such as IPTV or video on demand, that area is mostly covered now, they said: The future lies in developing new and interesting ways to use the plumbing.

“It feels very much like the music space 10 years ago,” said Kunz, who was one of the architects of German media group Bertelsmann’s purchase of Napster a decade ago.

“I think this whole plumbing era is the necessary prerequisite for the innovation era. The interesting thing is how established industry . . . is actually going to hedge their bets. There’s a lot of value in the old world that’s going to be destroyed.

“Without knowing what the future will look like, I think this ‘second screen’ will be a complementary way of looking at content — in some circumstances it might even be the ‘first screen.’ I think that’s one of the fascinating innovation areas of the future, to figure out how those screens interact with each other.”

His belief is that this will come in large part through social innovations and applications that provide a companion experience to big-screen viewing — hence the investment in Tweek, which recently launched an iPad app for finding video content that you might want to watch.

“I think in the end, the question will be, Is the selection process, are the criteria for selection, the ways I select, going to change? I think Facebook plays a strong role in that today, but we don’t know what that’s going to look like in the future. Tweek TV goes in that direction, to build an interface that is focused on moving content in order to make a much better selection process in future.”

Broadcasters could be cut out of the loop

Meanwhile, Rose said he believed the big disruption in TV was happening at the human level, because technology means that program producers are now able to access audiences in ways that weren’t possible before.

“Back in the old days before the Internet, the audience would engage with the broadcaster — the broadcaster created a channel and an aggregation and schedule things, and the audience were there and the broadcaster would buy content, and the content provider or owner really had no direct audience engagement. Then came the Internet and the makers of Glee could set up a website — but they were disconnected. Now with the rise of second-screen viewing, with companion viewing, there’s a way for the content producer to connect directly to the audience.”

Large producers can now create applications and experiences that audiences can use that deepen their link to the program, he said. And that could leave broadcasters becoming little more than a pipeline.

“The broadcaster, who today is a distributor, a channel and a content provider, may ultimately be like an ISP, and the audience engages directly with the program maker. That’s one way it may play out.”

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Since announcing an unpopular price hike in October, the Netflix (s NFLX) CEO has presided over a grim cascade of events that has seen the company’s prospects plummet. His drastic answer to the price problem — a surprise plan to separate the streaming and DVD businesses — got a cold reception, forcing him to rapidly back-pedal on the scheme. In the end, all he has to show for the company’s mad season is a confusing, sprawling mess largely composed of hordes of pissed off customers and a crumbling share price.

Given all of this, Hastings — and the business he runs — are desperate for some good news. And so we see the launch of Netflix in the U.K. and Ireland, which is certainly one way to try to get the company’s 2012 off to a strong start.

The basics, which we’ve already covered, are pretty familiar. British users pay £5.99 a month, while in Ireland it costs €6.99 (both around $9 USD). In return, they get access to a library of on-demand movies and television programs streamed to a device of their choosing. The service has forged deals with many local broadcasters, including the BBC and Channel 4, to provide a mixture of old and new programming on-demand. It has carried over rights for some top American TV series, and acquired a backlist of movies from most of the major studios.

It’s fair to say that the launch is off to a solid, though not spectacular, start.

Still, you can forgive Netflix for thinking it knows how to build up a business like this and make it work — after all, if it can crack the world’s most valuable TV and movie market, what’s to stop it doing the same elsewhere?

The truth is, however, it’s just not that simple: establishing itself on the other side of the Atlantic will not be easy, and major success could be almost impossible. Here’s why.

Mixed competition

First, Netflix’s rivals in the U.K. and Ireland are a lot more established. The biggest obvious competitor is Lovefilm, a DVD rental and on-demand streaming service that was bought out by Amazon a year ago.

Streaming service Blinkbox, meanwhile, has been going great guns since launching in 2006, and it has the marketing support of majority shareholder Tesco, the world’s second-most profitable retailer after Walmart. Google, at the same time, appears to have been concentrating its efforts to push YouTube rentals in Britain, with a publicity blitz in recent months.

These all make entry into the market complicated for Netflix, but not insurmountable.

Instead, the biggest stumbling block could be the existing TV players.

Two markets divided by a common language

Netflix may think its existing relationships and successes will be transferable — particularly ones that speak the same language and share similar tastes for Hollywood movies and American television. But what’s tough for outsiders to understand, however, is that the shape of British broadcasting is very, very different to the other side of the Atlantic.

Take Rupert Murdoch. In America, for example, he’s a major media operator and his Fox network is a big deal. But in the U.K., it’s even bigger. His British TV business, Sky, is much more advanced and influential, and has found great success by being very aggressive and forward-looking. Sky is prepared to pay over the odds to score rights to popular shows and jealously guards exclusive movie content as a way to safeguard its core subscription TV service: all things that could prove significant obstacles to Netflix’s ambitions.

In addition, Sky has invested heavily in mobile streaming apps with SkyGo, and has just announced a stake in Zeebox, an innovative TV guide app that I wrote about a few months ago. It’s not scared to move with the times, and it’s certainly going to continue to innovate, competing in that area with Netflix’s multi-device strategy.

The biggest difference that Netflix will find between America and Britain, however, is one that only takes three letters to explain: The BBC.

The role that publicly funded TV plays in the U.K. and Ireland is hard to overstate. The biggest streaming service here, by a long way, is the BBC’s iPlayer: a high quality product designed specifically to stream the latest episodes of some of the most popular TV in the market.

Going up against that is a very tall order. Sure, Netflix, Lovefilm and others have made deals to get hold of some BBC content, but they are largely getting non-exclusive access to a back catalog of older shows — old Doctor Who episodes, for example. But the iPlayer is free, and because it isn’t looking to extract maximum commercial value from it, the BBC isn’t handing out rights to new content. That makes it nearly impossible to compete with.

But it’s not just that. In addition, the iPlayer is also a markedly better experience than Netflix, both technically (I rarely find iPlayer struggling to deliver high-definition streams; only a limited amount of the Netflix launch catalog is available in HD) and in terms of user experience (Netflix’s U.K. UI is currently basic and hard to navigate around).

The battle of Hastings

None of this makes it impossible for Netflix to succeed, but it does mean the company’s definition of success has to be significantly altered.

From the outside, the British and Irish market looks like a vast patchwork of services and providers: perfect territory for a big, swaggering giant to come in and clean up. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: For Netflix to get anything like the success it has had in America, it will need to find out a way to get around Rupert Murdoch and the BBC, two of the world’s most powerful media forces.

They have no reason to work with Netflix and every reason to actively work against it, meaning that where Reed Hastings may have thought crossing the Atlantic was one way to get over his troublesome few months, in reality, he may have just laid the foundation for another year of headaches.

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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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