GetGlue / tvtag

» see getglue.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

getglue was the foursquare of television. you opened the app while watching a show and checked in to the specific episode. the app handed you a digital sticker and a feed of strangers watching the same thing at the same time. between 2010 and 2013 it was the second-screen app on every social-tv panel slide deck. it had something like four million registered users and half a billion check-ins by 2012, and most major us networks ran integration deals with it.

the company started in december 2007 as a more general "what are you into" recommendation system, founded by alex iskold in new york. it pivoted hard to television in june 2010 because that was where its users were spending time. the pivot worked. by 2013 getglue had raised over twenty-five million dollars from union square ventures and time warner, and was being acquired by a smaller company called i.tv for a similar number.

i never used it. getglue lived in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. i was watching shows in turkey, on broadcast schedules that did not match the us release schedules getglue was built around. the whole "everyone is watching the season finale together right now" energy never reached me, because by the time a us show aired in turkey it had already been spoiled for a year on twitter.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

getglue's pitch made sense in 2010. twitter was still a side feed where hashtags were just getting big, and us networks had figured out that fans wanted to talk to each other while a show aired. getglue offered a structured version of that: not a hashtag, but a check-in tied to a specific episode of a specific show, with a sticker reward and a per-show leaderboard. networks loved it because it generated measurable engagement data they could pitch to advertisers.

at peak the super bowl 2013 hit two hundred thousand check-ins on getglue alone. the breaking bad finale generated more activity than any tv show on twitter had at the time. for a window of about three years it was the place where tv watching became a public act with a public scoreboard.

~ the unraveling ~

twitter did to getglue what facebook did to a hundred other social apps: it absorbed the behavior. once twitter had hashtags and replies running smoothly, the structured "check in to mad men season 5 episode 7" act was harder to justify. the typical tv viewer was already on twitter posting reactions in plain text, no separate app required. getglue's stickers stopped feeling like rewards. they started feeling like extra steps before the conversation that was already happening on a different platform.

i.tv bought getglue in november 2013 with a plan to combine it with their tv-listings product. they rebranded it tvtag in january 2014. the color scheme moved from blue to red and the stickers got de-emphasized. users hated it. the rebrand was widely treated as a tell that the new owners didn't know what to do with the brand they had bought.

~ what got buried with it ~

tvtag shut down on 19 december 2014 with a short blog post about refocusing efforts. operations ended 1 january 2015. nothing was migrated. half a billion check-ins and the entire leaderboard archive vanished without a backup pipeline. the small audience that had treated the app as their tv watch-club had nowhere to go that was structured the same way.

the second-screen tv-app category survived for another year or two, mostly inside the official network apps, then quietly stopped being interesting. by 2017 the assumption was that twitter was the second screen and that nothing else was needed. by 2023 even that was less true. the second screen had become tiktok, where people did not check in to episodes; they cut them up.

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