When we were developing Yahoo TV, which ended up being deployed on a bunch of "smart" TVs for a while one of the things we struggled with was "what are people g

When we were developing Yahoo TV, which ended up being deployed on a bunch of "smart" TVs for a while one of the things we struggled with was "what are people going to do with this?" First thing that came to mind for me was, "look up the show on imdb.com". One huge issue though was that the TV basically didn't know what was on — the connected devices don't transmit that information. So we started thinking about a database of shows & movies so that we could identify what was on (using audio and video) when someone wanted to find out more about it. Amusingly, we were thinking about user convenience and not about advertising at all. I don't think Yahoo ever shipped that but I am not surprised it exists.