Tvtag’s life as the successor brand to GetGlue will be a short one. The social TV app will shut down at the start of the new year, i.TV confirmed.
“Later this month, we will be shutting down tvtag and its supporting apps in order to refocus our efforts on other initiatives,” tvtag told users via an email message Friday (December 19) that was first spotted by GigaOm. “Effective January 1, tvtag.com will no longer be accessible and the tvtag mobile apps will cease to function.”
The shutdown “is a clarifying step to focus our efforts behind i.TV initiatives that will become public early next year,” i.TV CEO Brad Pelo said in an emailed statement.“We’re grateful for our association with the GetGlue community as they became tvtag under our ownership. We have learned and benefitted greatly from our year together. One indicator of that benefit is that many of the GetGlue team members remain at i.TV and the bulk of our work force has shifted to New York City.”
The decision to shut down tvtag, an app/service that competes with companies such as Viggle, comes about 11 months after i.TV announced the tvtag brand, which resulted in the retirement of the GetGlue brand. i.TV announced its acquisition of GetGlue in November 2013. Viggle had earlier tried and failed to merge with GetGlue.
Following the deal, tvtag aggregated the i.TV second screen audiences from GetGlue, DirecTV and Nintendo (via the Nintendo TVii feature that’s baked into the Wii U console and Wii U GamePad). At the time, i.TV said the move would give tvtag a total reach of about 10 million users. As of December 20, the tvtag website claims that more than 15 million people “use i.TV technology to discover, watch and engage with television.”
The tvtag app let users “tag” moments during TV shows and sporting events with comments, doodles and memes. Tvtag also kept some of the GetGlue features in place by letting usres “check in” to a show and unlock digital stickers. “Tvtag is to Twitter what Instagram is to mobile messaging,” Pelo said when tvtag was introduced.
Ahead of the shutdown, i.TV told tvtag users that they can request a copy of their data by emailing their user names to datarequest@tvtag.com.
