Audible Magic has told Pocket-lint that it is talking to the maker of Zeebox, the UK social TV application, to bring its Shazam-style audio recognition software, Live TViD, to the platform.

Live TViD is a digital fingerprinting technology that listens to a brief snatch of the audio of a television broadcast, recognises its source and then presents that show's information in as few as 3 seconds, including name and details gleaned from Rovi's vast metadatabase via Rovi Cloud Services. At present, it works with over 150 networks, including live broadcasts and time-shifted content, and Pocket-lint saw it in action at CES in Las Vegas to impressive effect.

The company believes that the system will improve the experience of social TV viewing applications: "App developers often need to synchronise their app to what a viewer is watching on TV," it says. "Audible Magic's Live TViD service provides a simple way to do that in just a few seconds, even if it is a live event or a never before broadcast show."

The first application to announce its use of Live TViD is Miso, a US-based social TV platform for iPhone, and there are a few other apps in the States that offer similar features, such as IntoNow. However, it is Zeebox's interest in the service that excites us here in the UK.

Jay Friedman, Audible Magic's vice president of Marketing and Customer Support, explained to us that it is in talks with numerous partners around the world, including Zeebox: "We are in talks with them," he said when we mentioned former BBC iPlayer chief Anthony Rose's new project.

And should those talks be successful, it should be easy to implement into the existing Zeebox "augmented TV" app, as the Live TViD service can be integrated "using an easy to use API".

So, in future, rather than scrolling through the electronic programme guide on Zeebox and selecting the show you're watching (in order to post your interest socially) it should automatically guess what channel you're on, even if you don't use its remote control functionality. Sweet.

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