A new Android app has joined the the fast swelling ranks of Social TV services and their related applications. This latest one is from California based startup called Bazaar Labs and it is meant for their Social TV service called Miso. Miso is part of an increasingly popular genre of services where users are encouraged to share their TV watching with their friends.

The Miso service is similar to other services where virtual goods and recognitions are provided in exchange of information shared by the users. In Miso, users do a Foursquare like check-in when they are watching something and get to share their habits by check-in. Users get to ‘like’ each others ‘check-ins’ and also get to ‘favorite’ shows for ‘quick check-ins’.

It uses the same social competitive angle as social gaming and location-based services to entice users into sharing information that is highly relevant and useful to one industry. In this case it is the small screen entertainment industry. Miso is however competing with a lot of other similar services. Some of them are startups like Miso — like GetGlue and Philo and some of them are large entities like Comcast with its Tunerfish service/app and CBS leveraging its TV.com initiative with an app of its own.

So even though the service genre is comparatively new in the market, there’s already a lot of fragmentation. Simply because most service are similar to each other, there’s not going to be  clear leader any time soon. Both the startups and the large companies lack individuality in that manner. Miso tries to fill this by offering digital multimedia rewards like special videos but it remains to be seen whether they can really compete against the rest of the market. Especially the parts that are backed by big money and network.

[via]