Viggle

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

~ the obit ~

You held the phone up to the television and the app listened. Audio fingerprinting worked out which show was playing and checked you in without you typing anything, and then the points started arriving for sitting there. Enough points bought a Starbucks card or an Amazon voucher. That was the entire product, and in January 2012 it was novel enough that CNBC ran a piece on the man behind it in the week it launched.

That man was Robert F. X. Sillerman, who had spent thirty years buying and selling radio stations and live entertainment companies, and who had owned a piece of American Idol through CKX. He took over a shell called Gateway Industries in 2011, renamed it Function(x), and made Viggle its first product. The pitch to advertisers was that television finally had a measurable click, and the pitch to viewers was that the television they were already watching could pay for coffee.

The first year went well enough to be quoted for years afterward: 1.8 million registered users and 151 million check-ins by the app's first birthday on 26 January 2013.

It also never left the United States in any way that mattered. The check-in database held American programming and the rewards were American gift cards, so running it from Turkey would have meant holding a phone up to a schedule the app had never heard of.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mechanic ~

Second-screen apps were a whole small industry between about 2010 and 2014, built on a claim that turned out to be half right. People genuinely were on their phones while the television was on, so the attention was there to be captured. What none of these companies solved was why the viewer should hand that attention to an app rather than to the group chat they were already in.

Viggle's answer was to pay. That is a stronger hook than a badge, which is what most of its competitors offered, and it is also the reason the economics never closed: every engaged user was a cost line.

~ the money ~

In November 2012 Viggle agreed to buy GetGlue, the best-known check-in service for television, for $25 million in cash plus 48.3 million shares. The combined user base was reported around 4.5 million. GetGlue was rebranded as tvtag in 2014 and closed at the end of that year, so the acquisition bought a brand that was dead within two years.

Sillerman kept the company alive with his own money, lending it tens of millions across several rounds, which is the sort of arrangement that reads as commitment on the way up and as a warning on the way down. In December 2015 Perk.com took Viggle over. A year later RhythmOne bought Perk in an all-stock deal worth about $42.5 million, which put Viggle two owners away from the man who had funded it.

~ the funny part ~

The app kept running for three more years under owners who had bought it as inventory rather than as a product. The live check-in feature, the thing the whole company had been built on, was quietly removed from a late update, leaving an app that paid points for using streaming services instead of for watching broadcast television.

The end was administrative. Perk announced that its applications would stop working on 1 December 2019 and that unredeemed points would be erased after 20 November, giving everyone about a month to convert whatever they had into gift cards before it evaporated. Users spent that November on deal forums working out the most efficient way to cash out. Then the apps went dark on schedule, all of them together, and viggle.com went back to being a redirect.

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