Watching the Grammys with a SecondScreen

There were several advertised/marketed apps for tonight's Grammy's flying around the internet and on Twitter.  I thought, similar to the Super Bowl, I will do an app sampling to see how the consumer experience is improving across the board.

E! Live from the Red Carpet was an interesting app to watch the pre-Grammy show with.  For someone like myself who is not really paying attention to the red carpet, it had all of the "money shot" photos of the stars arriving in an easy to flick thru UI.  However, it behaved more like an app the assumed I was not watching TV than one that did.

The official Grammy/CBS app was surprisingly (for me at least) good.  You had decent Stimulating and Social options from nominees and winners to Twitter/chat feeds, to backstage live streaming interviews after the stars won their awards (something a real music fan would appreciate when the network is not carrying their star's post award comments).  The also packed the Social feed with "Insiders" including stars present at the award, the standard official feeds, and a wider fan feed.  They even had some decent trivia and decent polls.  As I said, a surprisingly decent UX for the consumer.

I switch over to see what Viggle and Bing's partnership was all about.  I still think their business model is interesting, but other than the Twitter feed (pretty standard in most apps today), there was not much else exciting happening in the app tonight.

I did try Miso, but could not get any Sideshows to come up and other than checking in, did not experience anything in the Social or Stimulating feature set.

So I broke ranks a little bit and gave Yap.tv a test drive since they have been improving in their UX lately.  For Social (Twitter feed, polls created by consumers, Live Chat), it does an outstanding job.

For me, the pleasant surprise of the night was TVplus.  Their show was well-curated tonight, with very relevant synchronized Stimulating events firing every 45 seconds or so.  I was actually quite captivated and hung out for awhile to see what they would choose next to try to gain my interest.

ConnecTV wasn't so hot.  Did a great job recognizing the show, but still doesn't know who my friends are and after a few minutes, SNAFU'd and showed me an ad for the upcoming Super Bowl.  A bit odd.

BuddyTV did a great job of helping me change channels but I was not looking much for their prowess in Simple and Discovery at the time (very little Social and Stimulating).

While Dijit's stimulaling features tonight continue to improve, it was Into from Yahoo that impressed me the most in terms of improving their experience from simple check-in to a more Social and Stimulating experience.

If I had to give a conclusion on the experience, I would still say there is much room for improvement. Clearly, the official Grammy app had the most relevant "official" content (to the point where I could not find Tweets slamming Rhianna's performance where I could find them in most of the 3rd party apps.  If you appreciate synchronized, relevant Stimulating content, than I think TVplus is the right answer for you.  If you like the social side, I thought ironically Yap.TV and the official Grammy app were neck and neck, thought the Yap.tv UI seemed more compelling.