(19 May 2012 1:23 pm)

MUMBAI: What’s-On-India (WOI), a TV search and EPG (electronic program guide) company ,has announced the launch of a new product - Social EPG.

WOI has integrated Facebook login on its website and is in the process of extending Facebook logins into its entire mobile and tablet apps as well. The central idea of this is: TV viewers could use Facebook to share each other’s viewing preferences to discover TV shows as well as converse about them.

WOI Social EPGs will help viewers discover shows, films, matches and documentaries that their social networks and peers are talking about as well as share common interest programmes to converse about those shows.

What’s-On-India CEO Atul Phadnis said, "Social TV recommendations are considered powerful due to their viral nature and their ability to create tremendous positive or negative word-of-mouth especially for new shows and programs. Our social network has different clusters of friends representing different interest groups like tennis buddies, college friends, school friends etc. Each of these interest groups could collectively or individually spark off discovery of common interest TV shows relevant to those specific friend clusters."

This power to social TV recommendations is due to the fact that they originate from a ‘trusted’ source based on their relationship to the person who made the recommendation. This integration between What’s-On-India’s TV search platforms and Facebook will now help the viewers find, share, and engage around TV content.

The next move from the company is to provide these features on the What’s-On-India applications (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Symbian and Blackberry) and also integrate the same with other social networking platforms such as Twitter and Google+. All of these features will be powered using What’s-On-India’s proprietary EPG-On-Cloud platform and can be embedded inside third party apps as well.