I remember the Digital Convergence guys -- they were actually an infomercial company who did a show, "Net Talk Live!" (punctuation and all) that was targeted at the AOL set. Their other product was something called, IIRC, "Concerto," which was an app that required you to connect your PC's mic-in to your TV, whereupon you would occasionally hear an ear-blasting squelch of noise during Friends, and your PC would suddenly send your browser to a webpage. It wasn't exactly a graceful user experience.

You could argue that they were just too far ahead of curve from an engineering and core technology perspective -- wavelet fingerprinting techniques and Shazam were still far in the future -- but I also believe that the CC's failure is instructive in its own right; by attempting to piggyback on existing media without recontextualizing their presentation and consumption, you ended up with a user-hostile experience that added no value for either the consumer or the creator.