Shazam Expands to the U.S. TV World

Shazam can be credited for increasing the pop culture knowledge and music libraries of countless young professionals. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the app helps identify songs heard on the car radio, coffee shop, clothing store and so on. In a natural progression, the company has recently expanded into the realm of American television, with partnerships with shows like American Idol and brands that include almost half of the Super Bowl advertisers.

Now, Shazam announces that it is expanding its television influence beyond these individual partnerships, providing a service that allows users to tag any show on any channel in a similar fashion as users tag songs. When the app’s big button is pushed, the app will offer trivia, cast information, celebrity dirt, live music and Twitter feeds. Just in time for football season, if you’re watching a sporting event, the app will offer details like stats, scores and schedules instead of cast information. The application is available for Android, the iPhone and pretty much every other smartphone on the market.

Shazam For TV allows users to tag live content and users can tag content from 160 U.S. channels but won’t work for some solely local content. As of now, the function is only available in the United States, but for frequent US business trips and weekend getaways to places like NYC and Chicago, we thought it would be relevant for our tech-loving YP readers.

Tapping into the social media world, the app also allows users to instantly share and comment on the show or episode via Facebook and Twitter. Users’ tags will now appear in their Facebook timelines and they will be able to see the tags of their friends on Facebook. The new sharing features will be released in the coming weeks with additional features anticipated in the coming months, including being able to “Like” tags.

The TV function is now live on the current version of the application, which has currently been used by 250 million people around the world, as the company announced today.