MeeTV delivers the latest TV gossip to your iPhone
Kosmix, a company that automatically generates informational pages about any topic, has been dipping its toe into news aggregation with a site called MeeHive. And now it’s delivering that news to your iPhone too, with super-focused news applications, including a new one called MeeTV that helps users follow the news about the favorite TV shows.
When I downloaded MeeTV, nothing grabbed me right away, but its simplicity is growing on me. You select all of your favorite shows, then MeeTV creates a feed about all the shows with the latest news and biggest stories. You can also drill down into the news from a specific show.
This is a very different experience from using Google Reader, my main source of news, on my iPhone, where articles are gathered based on news source, not topic. And it’s simpler than going to Google News and doing a search for the shows I care about. (Also, under the hood, it uses Kosmix’s “taxonomy” to group news stories by topic, rather than just by keyword.) TV fans who follow a bunch of shows would probably get the most use out of this, since they can see all the news they want in one place.
Co-founder Venky Harinarayan says the lightweight nature of the app is intentional and a key part of Kosmix’s strategy on the iPhone. On a mobile device, users don’t want to have to futz around to find the news they’re interested in, he says, or customize different feeds. So there’s an app for MeeHive, the Mountain View, Calif. company’s general news site, but the company’s newer apps are narrower, including MeeTV and also an Indian news app called Samachar India News. There are more country-specific news apps coming soon, Harinarayan says. This is pretty much the opposite approach to Kosmix’s development on the web, where it started out by creating websites that focused on different topics, then consolidated them at a single Kosmix site — except for RightHealth, which was just too popular and too lucrative to shut down.
Asked how these free apps will make money, Harinarayan says he isn’t worried about that yet — RightHealth is bringing in enough money that the company can focus on doing whatever it can to grow the audience for Kosmix and MeeHive, then worry about monetization later. (The $20 million that Kosmix raised from Time Warner and others probably helps with this attitude, too.)
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.