Disney UTV Digital launches UTV Stars app with augmented reality based search

Disney UTV Digital has launched the UTV Stars App for Android and iOS. The entertainment content focused app offers Bollywood news, gossip, movies and live TV streaming. The app also offers a special augmented reality feature that allows users to click a  picture of a movie poster from any medium and get access to multimedia information related to the movie including customized content like movie trailers, behind the scenes videos, Tweets, and pictures, among other content. The augmented reality feature, Snap Search, is powered by Ricoh Innovations' Ocutag Technology.

The app offers updates through a 'Just In' section, in the form of latest tweets from celebrities, a special 'spotted' feed with news and gossip from UTV Stars that includes paparazzi pictures, and videos from the channel.The updates can be shared via Facebook, Twitter and Email. Users can also mark updates as favourites and access them later through a Favourites list. Photos can also be viewed full screen.

The Movies section of the app allows users to play individual movie clips or full length Bollywood movies through the app. The library includes movie titles like Rowdy Rathore, Barfi!, 7 Khoon Maaf, Ek Main aur Ekk Tu and others. Movies can be sorted according to the ratings or popularity. Users can also search for movies on the app.

Users can also watch the live stream of UTV's Bollywood focused tv channel, UTV Stars within the app.

We tried the app on an iPhone 5 and found that it worked as promised although the augmented reality function did not return accurate results if the movie was not in the app's database. It did display relevant results for movies that were present in UTV's database. Live tv streaming worked well and we were able to play videos as well. The app is ad supported with banner ads in the app's main interface and pre-roll banner ads in video clips and movies.

Download: Android app |  iOS app