Miso TV

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

~ the obit ~

Miso opened at SXSW Interactive in March 2010 with a pitch that fit in one line: the Foursquare of television. You told the app what you were watching, it gave you a badge and a feed of everyone else watching the same thing, and the show became a place you could check into the way you checked into a bar.

It worked well enough to raise real money. Google Ventures came in on the seed round in May 2010 and returned for a $1.5 million Series A alongside Hearst, and Khosla Ventures led a $4 million round in December 2011. Registered users went past a hundred thousand before the first year was out. For a while every network with a drama on air wanted to know what the second screen was going to do for them.

Checking in did reach me, through Foursquare, which had a genuine Turkish audience around 2011 and put mayor badges on places I actually walked past. The television version could not make that trip. It needed a country where everyone watched the same episode on the same night and then talked about it in English, and Turkish broadcast schedules in 2011 ran four-hour dizi episodes with no synchronized second screen anywhere near them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The company shipped more than the check-in. SideShow pushed synced content to your phone while an episode played, which was the closest anyone came to the promise the whole category was selling: the show on one screen and something worth reading on the other, timed to the minute.

The problem was that the timing had to be built by hand, episode by episode, for shows the app did not own. Every second-screen company hit this. GetGlue, IntoNow and Miso all discovered that the interesting version of the product required a content deal with a network, and the networks were happy to be excited about second screens without paying for one.

~ the cracks ~

By 2012 the check-in itself had stopped being a thing people did. Foursquare split its own app in two and moved away from the badge, and every product built on the same gesture lost the habit underneath it. Miso had a hundred thousand registrations and no reliable reason for anyone to open the app on a Tuesday.

Dijit Media acquired the company in February 2013 for the discovery technology rather than the audience, and said it would keep Miso and SideShow running. Somrat Niyogi came along as an advisor. Eleven months later Viggle bought Dijit, which meant Miso now sat inside a company whose actual business was paying people points for checking into television.

~ the inheritance ~

Users got their notice in September 2014 and the app went dark on 23 October. The suggested replacement was Viggle, owned by the same parent, which itself ran out of road within two years.

gomiso.com answers today and has nothing to do with any of this. It serves a WordPress site reviewing television, built by somebody who bought a domain with history attached and no obligation to it. That is a normal end for a startup name: the idea gets absorbed into the platforms, the audience forgets, and the URL goes on to a second job.

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