Ever wanted to know exactly which TV network is talking about a certain topic right now? Boxfish’s new iPad app has got you covered: The company indexes the closed captioning data from 3,600 TV stations in real time and presents it in a Twitter-like fashion.

Reblogged from GigaOM, by Janko Roettgers

Forget social, forget check-ins, and don’t even think about TV shows on Netflix or Hulu: Boxfish’s new iPad app, which went live in the Apple App Store, is taking a radically different approach to tell you what to watch. It’s squarely aiming at news junkies, sports fans and people obsessed with celebrity gossip – or anyone who wants to have fun flaking out in front of the TV.

Here is how it works: Boxfish takes the the closed captions from 3,600 cable and local broadcast stations all over the U.S. and indexes and analyses all this data in real time. The result is presented as a constantly updating stream of trends and topics – think Tweetdeck, but for live TV.

Boxfish presents updates from the world of sports, news, business and celebrity gossip by default as part of its live feed. It also surfaces trending topics, which at the time of writing included Paul Ryan, Medicare and Chad Johnson. Users can customize the app by adding their own favorite channels to take a quick glance at what’s being talked about on CNBC or ESPN at any given time. And the app can be synched with a TiVo or a DirecTV set-top box to help users change the channel every time they want to tune into a conversation. However, there’s no easy way to filter out channels that a subscriber doesn’t have access to… [Read More]

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