Sometimes, I wonder if Bruce Springsteen looks back at his song, 57 Channels, and has a laugh at the current state of entertainment. These days, 57 channels of television programming is nothing -- we have hundreds of cable options, not to mention iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon. The NextGuide app tries to make some sanity of the mess, and today's update should help make things even clearer.
When Michael Simon reviewed the TV Guide-like app last month, he was impressed with the overall concept, but NextGuide had its fair share of shortcomings. Namely, the search recommendations were a bit lacking, and the interface suffered from latency in control.
But today, developer Dijit Media has updated the free app, hoping to eliminate some of those very issues.
Judging by the update notes, Dijit was paying attention to feedback from users. NextGuide has -- thankfully -- added support for Amazon Prime and Instant videos, creating a fairly complete media guide in addition to its searchable live television, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and iTunes listings.
More importantly, the developer claims NextGuide features better algorithms when searching the massive database. If there's one killer feature of NextGuide, it's the ability to search across a wide selection of media networks simultaneously, and if the returns on search keywords are improved, that's a huge boon.
Other update features include new touch-screen gestures for sorting through listings, a category editor, better channel setup, and various other bug fixes. Here's hoping the update elevates NextGuide from a "decent" app, to something you'll want to refer to every time you turn on the television.
Just don't blame us if you've got 5,700 channels and there's nothing on.
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