Schematic showing how Windows Media Center synchronises with vuPlan.tv

Last year we wrote about a new Windows Phone remote recording application for Windows Phone, they were looking for Windows Media Center users to test the service and now the service is live. With the service you can remotely schedule Windows Media Center recordings from a Windows Phone and see what others are recording and watching.  There is a Windows Media Center client application and a remote recording app for Windows Phone which costs £3.99. There is also a free version but that doesn’t offer remote recording. Anybody thinking of giving it a try?

 

Connected TV start-up vuPlan.tv™ releases its Remote Record application for Windows Phone 7

The vuPlan.tv™ team have been building what they deem ‘the future of television’ and are excited to release their connected-TV app onto the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.

With connected television basking in the lime-light at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the platform from British start-up vuPlan.tv™ aims to revolutionise the way consumers pick and plan what they watch on TV, and ultimately how they engage with the show as it airs.

After the last few years being about on-demand television services, social media is set to reinvigorate the consumption of live broadcasts. Viewers are increasingly consuming television while using a secondary device such as a tablet, phone or laptop – the so-called 2nd screen – logging-in to their favourite social network to share their views and see what other people are saying about the shows, while the broadcast runs on the main screen.

vuPlan.tv™ is aimed right at this market and seeks to make it easier to discover what to watch and what everyone else is watching with the help of a demographic breakdown. The latest Remote Record app adds the convenience of setting the recorder when away from home, or without having to find the right show and hit record via the recorder’s own menu system.

Luke Puplett, Founder and Chief Technology Officer said “The first step is to connect the TV to the internet and share viewing information from the device, then mix that data with some information about the viewer, before building a TV guide that shows what like-minded people are watching, or make suggestions based on emerging patterns, even geographical trends.”

The vuPlan.tv™ Remote Record application runs on devices running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 “Mango” operating system and is the premium paid product, partnered with a free version that has no remote record facility. At the other end is vuPlan™ for Windows Media Center, a small piece of software which unobtrusively monitors the recordings being made and synchronises with a central service via the Internet.

“Windows Media Center® has long afforded its wide user-base with pause, rewind and multi-channel recording of live TV and is naturally connected and programmable since it’s just a PC. This, coupled with its unrivalled connectivity around the home via Xbox 360 consoles, made it a great choice as the first connected media device that vuPlan.tv™ should support,” said Luke Puplett.

He continued, “Data from connected TVs lets us identify behavioural patterns that we may not be aware of, for example, statistics show that I have an inclination towards director/producer Paul Wheeler, certainly something I wouldn’t normally look for, so my TV guide is actually guiding me.”

To extend coverage beyond the Windows Phone OS, the company are focussing their attention on a mobile HTML site that will offer insights into viewing habits in addition to the more typical listings pages.

vuPlan.tv™ is a product of Evoq Limited, a small software consultancy based in the United Kingdom. You can follow the progress of the vuPlan dev team via the social media sources below:

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