Gracenote TrackID on Sony TVs (photos)

In 2011 Internet-connected TVs from Sony have a new feature similar to Shazam found on smartphones. The service, which Sony is branding TrackID, relies on a "fingerprinting" technology powered by Gracenote--a company formerly known as CDDB and bought by Sony in 2008. The way it works is simple: anytime you hear a song, or snippet of music, on your TV, you can hit the "TrackID" button to attempt to identify it.

After hitting the button, the service will search for about five seconds and then indicate the results. Positive searches can have more than one result.

After a positive search, you can launch the full app, which brings up the results. Previous searches can be added to bookmarks and the app also keeps a search history.

Drilling down into a search result gives you artist, album, and other information. You can also initiate a search within the Sony TV's apps.

Choosing to search within apps leads to a choice of searching across Sony's Bravia Video services (excluding Netflix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, and Hulu Plus) or a "video search," which at the moment provides only text-based results like biographical information--a sort of "IMDB lite."

Choosing one of the options just fills in the search field with the artist or song title name...

...which often yields useless results.

The "IMDB lite" portion of the service can also be searched manually.

The information provided by "video search" doesn't yet include any video...

...just a short biography so far.