Yesterday, while waiting for a flight in the Atlanta airport, I tried out a free app called Tunity. It's a neat service that plays on your iPhone the sound from a television that is tuned to certain channels — the idea being that even if the TV is muted or too low for you to hear, you can still watch the TV and listen to the audio using headphones on your iPhone. I used it in an airport, but the website for the app suggests that you can also use it in other places such as a bar, gym, waiting area, etc.
Using the app is simple. Just point your iPhone at the screen and tap a button for Tunity to scan the TV. It works best if you are pretty close to the screen, but as you can see from the below photos, I got the app to work even when I was pretty far away from the TV (although sometimes I had to scan more than once from this distance for it to work).
If Tunity is unable to figure out what you are watching, you will get an error message. I found that the app sometimes wouldn't work when a commercial was playing, but worked well during the regular broadcast.
Once Tunity detects what is on the TV, you wait a few seconds, and then the audio starts to stream. Often you will find that the audio is not in perfect sync with the TV, but you can press the fast forward and rewind buttons to skip the streamed audio ahead or behind so that it matches the video.
When I was in the airport yesterday, the TV audio was being played on a speaker in the airport. It was sometimes hard to hear over the background noise in the airport, but I was able to take out one of my earphones to listen to the sound in the airport in one ear and the sound from my iPhone in the other ear to quickly figure out how to sync the audio. (The stream from Tunity was usually a little ahead of what I was hearing at the airport.) But if you are in an environment where the TV is muted, it might be a little more difficult to guess whether you need to skip the audio slightly ahead or slightly behind to match the lips of the person speaking. Having said that, even if the audio is slightly out of sync, I suspect that for many programs, it will be OK if the audio is slightly out of sync with the video.
I found that after listening to the audio for a few minutes, the audio would sometimes get slightly out of sync again, even if I started by getting them perfectly in sync. I'm not sure why the Tunity stream played just slightly faster than the actual TV, but any time that I noticed it, it was easy enough to tap the rewind button once to get it back in sync.
Tunity works with lots of national stations, but not every station. You can tap a button in the app to see all of the compatible stations, which include the New York feeds of the major network stations including ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX (and in Atlanta I was also able to see the Atlanta major networks, so perhaps there are other major city networks that work), plus lots of popular cable stations including AMC, CNN, CNBC, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Food Network, TBS, TNT, USA, etc. And lots of sports networks work too, such as Big Ten Network, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPNU, Fox Sports 1, Golf Channel, MLB Network, NBA TV, NFL Network, NHL Network, SEC Network, etc.
The app only works with live content from supported channels. Thus, if you are watching a TV that is showing a movie from a DVD, or a local station that isn't included in the app, it won't work.
I've been in sports bars that had lots of different TVs tuned to different channels showing different games. I can imagine using Tunity to listen to the audio of the game that interests me on one TV, even if audio from another TV is being played at the bar.
The app is free to download and you can try it out without an account for a while, but then it eventually asks you to create a (free) account to continue using the app.
Tunity is a neat idea that works well. I'm not sure when I will next use this app, but this is exactly the sort of app that I like to have on my iPhone so that it is there whenever I need it.