‘Next generation TV guide’ Tweek.tv has finally launched its free iPad app, which provides a socially-curated hub for on-demand film and live television.
Unlike its web-app beta incarnation, Tweek.tv’s finalized product is a native iPad app that — after being officially unveiled at the London Web Summit on Monday — is now live in the iTunes store for customers in the UK and Germany.
The app effectively provides a discovery layer that spans several distinct islands of online film and TV content. It recommends programming mostly through the likes taken from your Facebook friends — and doesn’t host content itself, but rather forwards the user to partners such as iTunes and the BBC. That’s ironic, because content from the latter is only available to German customers since British license-fee payers can’t get the BBC’s iPad app.
When I caught up with the Tweek.tv team recently, they suggested that in the future their recommendation data would also take in sources such as IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, not just Facebook.
Tweek.tv’s referral-led approach makes licensing unnecessary and keeps the service legal (and, its Nokia alumni founders hope, profitable). Of course, each content partnership comes with regional restrictions, so the service could be a tad unpredictable during international travel.
In the UK, the partners include iTunes, Vimeo, YouTube and Crackle – Tweek.tv says it’s also working on a Netflix agreement “but this is taking longer”. For Germany, the service takes in content from iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, BBC iPlayer, dailyme, MyVideo.tv, ZDF Mediathek and Eurosport Live.
It’s a good-looking app but probably not yet optimized to take advantage of the third generation iPad’s high resolution, given the fact that the device only hit shelves last Friday. That said, the team told me the beefed-up graphics of the new iPad makes the app “way faster”.
Here are a couple of screenshots:
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