Somrat Niyogi, Miso CEO, spoke on a panel of Social TV companies at last week’s Social TV Summit in New York. Check out the clip below, and to watch more videos from the event  visit socialtvsummit.com.

We are excited to announce today that Miso iPhone users can now connect to their AT&T U-verse receivers for a faster and easier way to check-in and interact around your favorite shows!

Just open up Miso, and as an AT&T U-verse Enabled app you simply select the receiver you want to connect to and it will immediately show what’s playing on your U-verse receiver. As you flip through channels, Miso changes to display what’s on. You don’t have to search anymore to check-in, just tap and share.

As part of this app update we’re also introducing a new feature just for U-verse customers: Tap “Watch it” on any show in the Miso app and it will initiate a search on your U-verse receiver. From there you can change the channel or set a recording. This means no longer using your remote’s arrows to type in show names when searching.

These features are just the very beginning of how we are making it easier to share what you watch and get more from your TV experience. Learn more at gomiso.com/uverse and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Here at Miso, we’re still excited about the announcements at last week’s f8 and we’re proud to be an early partner to work with Facebook’s new Open Graph. Mark Zuckerberg called the Open Graph “a completely new class of social apps to discover new things through your friends with frictionless experiences, real-time serendipity, and finding patterns in your friends activity.”

Zuckerberg’s keynote showcased how Facebook and social services like Miso can work together to allow people to socialize around the media they consume, especially with activities as naturally social as television watching.

Through Open Graph, Facebook has provided a more open platform that allows developers to create sharing actions that are tightly integrated into the way Facebook’s site operates — by using real action verbs like “watch”. We’re still perfecting the details, but looking forward to releasing this integration to Miso users soon.  Join us on Facebook for updates on the official launch.

Miso and DIRECTV, the world’s largest pay TV service, announce the launch of the first social TV app synchronized with television viewing, enabling real-time social features that change based on what you’re watching.

The new integrated iPhone app is available today for free on the App Store. The app shows you what’s on TV and, as you switch the channel, changes with it. No longer do you have to manually search to share what you are watching – just tap and share as you watch. All that is required is that phone is on the same Wi-Fi network as your DIRECTV Internet-enabled receiver.

“The integration of Miso’s social TV app adds another dimension to the viewing experience and supports DIRECTV’s strategy to assist customers in discovering television shows, sports and movies through their friends and social connections,” said DIRECTV CTO Rômulo Pontual.

As mobile increasingly becomes the go-to device in everyone’s homes, integrating it into the consumer’s TV viewing habits is becoming as natural as flipping a TV remote. By synchronizing the second screen with live, time-shifted and on-demand content and introducing social features, Miso is enabling the most comprehensive social TV experience.

“Our partnership with DIRECTV is a big step toward delivering a truly connected home experience because, for the first time ever, a social TV app will enable viewers to easily share what they’re watching, as they’re watching it,” said Somrat Niyogi, CEO of Miso. “DIRECTV is a leader in providing innovative entertainment and we’re excited to be working with them to deliver this industry first. This is just the first of many new partnerships we’ll announce in the coming months.”

Sharing what you watch just got easier.

Download the app today and let us know what you think! More at gomiso.com/directv.

We’re excited to announce another new feature in Miso for iPhone: Shout!

Let’s say you’re watching a baseball game on TV. Wouldn’t it be cool to see what other people are saying about the game? With Miso Shout! you can cheer for your team or talk trash with fans of the other team.

It’s fun because everyone is watching together!

• Shout! makes it easy to share reactions and opinions about anything that you watch — down to the specific episode or game.
• Shouts appear in the Chatter stream – a new feed for every single episode, movie, and sports game.
• You can participate in the conversation knowing that everyone is watching the exact same thing.

Shout! is another reason why Miso is the best way to connect with friends while watching TV. Download the iPhone app now and give us a Shout!

People love sharing what game they are watching. We want to make this easier.

In the same way that Miso users prefer to check-in TV episodes, we know that sports fans prefer to share the exact game they are watching — not just the team or the league. In fact, up until now we’ve relied on dedicated fans who have added a lot of this content to Miso manually for every single game (A big thank you to all those users who’ve helped!!).

New sports pages on Miso now let you check-in to the exact sports game you are watching on TV.

• Game pages for popular sports are accurately and automatically updated in Miso daily.
• Search delivers time-based, relevant results so you can find a game that’s on within seconds.
• “Pick Em” lets you pick and share your team on the iPhone app.

With this new feature, it will be even easier for friends and fans to discover more moments to connect around the games they watch. This is just the beginning of a great experience for sports fans in Miso. Please let us know what else you would love to see for sports!

In Miso’s first developer contest we received over 20 amazing apps and projects that leveraged the Miso public API (launched in January of this year).

We’re excited to announce that the winner is:

• App Name: Miso for Windows Phone 7
• Developer: José Ramón Claramunt Viana of Mobilendo

This app was chosen for its extensive and well-constructed use of the Miso API including recently added endpoints that allow for episode check-in. Within the app itself we liked the intuitive user flows and slick design. We’re excited to see such a complete version of Miso now available for WP7 users! This brand new app has just been submitted to the Windows Marketplace and should be available for Windows Phone 7 users next week.

For a preview of the winning app, check out the video demo:

We had so many great submissions that we would also like to give special recognition to the runner-up of the contest:

• App Name: Miso for BlackBerry PlayBook
• Developer: Mokriya

This app was recently featured in the BlackBerry App World and we blogged about the details here.

The Miso team would like to personally thank each and every developer who submitted an app to our contest. We had a lot of great submissions and we’re looking forward to hosting more contests in the future.

That’s not all, Miso has a brand new App Gallery!

Third party Miso apps built with our API are now organized and accessible in Miso’s very own app gallery which we just launched today. Powered by our terrific friends at AppStores, the gallery allows users to explore and discover new apps and integrations such as Miso for new mobile platforms, a WordPress plugin, website widgets and more! Soon developers will be able to submit their projects directly to the Miso App Gallery for review and approval.

We are seeing more and more people using our API every month. Interest is high, not just with app developers, but among many players in the TV space including MSOs. Our goal is to be the go-to social TV partner for developers, cable companies, Internet connected TV experiences — anyone who wants to bring social TV experiences to their product or service.

Our belief is that we can’t innovate on the second screen or in social TV alone. Openness and collaboration are key. The Miso App Gallery showcases not only the collaboration we are already doing with developers but also the ability of the platform and API to enable the creation of high-quality, functional social TV apps.

Want to join us in our mission? Please reach out at api@gomiso.com or partners@gomiso.com.

Happy watching (and coding)!
The Miso Team

Miso for BlackBerry PlayBook is now a featured app in BlackBerry App World! The app was created entirely by a third party developer  – Mokriya – using Miso’s public API.

At Miso, our focus is building better relationships between friends by connecting them around the shows they watch. We believe that social TV experiences happen everywhere, and by opening up our API we invite others to help us create those experiences.

Check out a demo of the PlayBook app:

Still waiting for a BlackBerry mobile app? Sign-up here and we’ll let you know when it’s available.

TV watching is a passive experience. People sit and stare at a screen. But, if watching TV is a passive experience, is the second screen a passive experience too?

Back in January , we explored this question in more depth by experimenting with the delivery of synchronized content. Our internal innovation team, Miso Labs, created an experimental app called Miso Sync which integrates with Boxee to deliver a pop-up video like experience. The app pushes fun and interesting bits of information to your 2nd screen at the exact moment something happens on the 1st screen (TV). We tested the Miso Sync app across 5 different shows, with a group of about 40 beta testers.

Based on our findings, we believe that the second screen functions best as an active vehicle, rather than a passive one. First, it turns out that people expect a highly personalized experience when it comes to their phone as a second screen medium. Almost everything on a phone is personalized to you: weather apps show you the weather in YOUR city, Yelp gives restaurant recommendations closest to YOU, and book apps let you add YOUR thoughts as annotations to the page.  This personalization lends itself to an active experience where you consume and interact with content as a two-way street.

The second reason we believe the 2nd screen is an active vehicle is that people naturally want to touch and interact with their phones, rather than just sit and hold them. When was the last time you got up off the couch to go touch your TV screen? Seems silly, right? But the phone is right in front of you, in your hand, so it’s very natural that people want to take it out and interact with it.

We also explored whether people want information delivered to them while watching TV and, if so, what type of information? It turned out to be a very complex question. We learned that people want extremely customized and relevant information, and what they want changes drastically depending on a number of factors including the type of show.

The Miso Sync Experiment

So today we are publishing more detail around these learnings, in a report called “The Miso Sync Experiment”. It’s a free report and you can download it here. We’re just getting started with our research and we’ll share more learnings as we build new experiences on the second screen. How would you like to use a second screen when you watch TV? Help us out by letting us know in comments below.

*Check out Mashable’s story about our report: http://mashable.com/2011/05/12/miso-sync/