USA The war for control of the TV screen

The war for control of the TV screen, specifically the battle over which company or companies will own the user interface—and by default, the relationship with the average viewer—has only just begun. Whether the ultimate winner is a cable company, a TV manufacturer, Apple, Amazon, Xbox, Hulu, Roku or somebody else, pretty much everyone agrees that TV is getting messy.

Indeed, anybody who’s spent time jumping between linear TV,a DVR, a cable company's on-demand menu, a Netflix account, aHulu Plus subscription and a gaming console—hooking up andunhooking HDMI cables along the way—can attest that if somebod can simplify the TV experience, they’d havea great shot at winning its future. A startup called Matcha thinks ithas a pretty good shot.

The company built an iPad app designed to serve as the ultimate TV companion. Through a growing slate of partnerships, Matcha allows users to sift through all the TV shows they might have at their disposal in one screen. It also offers a recommendation engine, social TV elements, and supplementary content from the likes of IMDB and RottenTomatoes.com.

Matcha has already partnered with Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and Comcast’s Xfinity to provide users with access to 200,000 movie and TV titles they can elect to watch on the big screen or in some cases within the app itself. And now the company is set to announce similar pacts with HBO Go, Max Go (Cinemax), as well as Turner (apps for TNT and TBS).

The plan is to partner with every important network and cable player under the sun, said Guy Piekarz, Matcha’s founder and CEO, who is betting on a future where apps rule TV. “The old way of discovery is not good. As the market matures the problem is increasing. So we’ve started first with the ‘over the top’ services like Hulu Plus and networks like Xfinity,” he said. “But the idea is that people will be able to use the app and access content no matter what the source. Being comprehensive for us is a big deal."