IntoNow

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

~ the obituary ~

intonow was a category-specific product from the tv-check-in era of social apps, which is a phrase that only made sense in the 2011-2013 window. i was 27 in january 2011, in ankara, watching turkish tv on a real tv set with no app layer above it. the whole idea of holding your smartphone up to a show so an app could tell your friends what you were watching was distinctly US and distinctly early-2010s. i did not download it. i had heard of it through techmeme headlines about the yahoo acquisition and that was the extent of my contact.

adam cahan's team shipped intonow to the iOS app store on 31 january '11. the app used a patented audio-fingerprint system they called SoundPrint. you held the phone up, the app listened for a few seconds, matched the audio against a database of tv show sound tracks, and told you exactly what show and episode was playing. that was the demo. the social layer was the check-in: intonow posted "watching mad men s04e07" to your feed and your friends could join. the auto content recognition tech was the thing that made all of it work.

yahoo bought intonow twelve weeks after launch. announcement was 25 april '11, price was around 20-30 million dollars, adam cahan was made senior vp of mobile and emerging products at yahoo under carol bartz, then under scott thompson, then under marissa mayer. the app kept running as a standalone product through the marissa mayer years, got redesigned twice, added social features and never quite grew. by early 2014 it was one of the many yahoo mobile apps quietly getting cut.

~ the case file ~

~ the tv check-in moment ~

tv check-in was a category that existed for about eighteen months. getglue was the big one, miso was the second-place one, tunerfish was the comcast one, intonow was the shazam-native audio-fingerprint one. the shared premise was that watching tv was already a social activity in the living-room sense and mobile apps could extend that into an asynchronous social feed. you check in to your show, your friends check in to theirs, you compare notes on how the season is going.

the category never really worked. the problem was that unlike foursquare check-ins (which had discovery utility, "what bar is my friend at") or shazam identifications (which had a save-for-later utility, "add this song to my playlist"), tv check-ins had no useful downstream action. your friends knew what you were watching. so what. no follow-up interaction to hang the retention on. by 2014 getglue had been rebranded and sold, miso was gone, intonow was gone.

~ the day it died ~

the app disappeared from the apple app store and the google play store around 24 january '14. androidpolice ran a piece called "yahoo kills yet another product" on 5 february. the official service shutdown was 31 march. that day. the servers went off, the sound-print database stopped accepting queries, the standalone product was gone.

the interesting part is that the SoundPrint technology itself did not die. adam cahan and the intonow team stayed inside yahoo and the audio-recognition tech got embedded into yahoo smart tv and later into the loops feature in the yahoo sports iOS 7 app. that was the pattern for a lot of the 2010-2013 acquisitions yahoo made: kill the product, keep the team, port the interesting piece of tech into a yahoo shell. summly went the same way, into yahoo news digest. summly's founder nick d'aloisio was 19 by that point, adam cahan was more senior, both of them shipped the acquired-tech-inside-a-yahoo-shell version of what they had built independently.

~ what got buried with it ~

the SoundPrint patents outlived the intonow app itself. the general idea of audio fingerprinting for automatic content recognition ended up embedded in smart tvs from samsung and LG, in the acr chips that vizio ships in every set. the entire streaming-ads and second-screen-advertising industry that grew up through the late 2010s runs on the same category of audio-recognition tech intonow was demoing in january 2011.

still. the tv check-in social layer never came back and probably never will. what actually happened instead is that the phone stayed the phone and the tv stayed the tv, and the co-watching layer moved into twitter (later X) and reddit threads. the category intonow was pointed at was correctly identified as important. the shape of the answer they proposed did not survive contact with what people actually did when a show was on.

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