Social TV service TVtag, previously known as GetGlue, to shut down end of 2014
GetGlue successor TVtag is shutting down — Janko Roettgers — Social TV service TVtag, which was previously known as GetGlue, is shutting down at the end of the year. TVtag announced the shut …
Context & Ripple Effects
TVtag was the last iteration of GetGlue, which imported the Foursquare check-in mechanic into television — users checked in to shows rather than places, making it one of the flagship products of the early-2010s 'social TV' bet. Its closure lands amid a broader cull of standalone video-social services: Maker Studios shut down pioneering web-video site Blip in 2015 (Blip), Kevin Rose killed his photo-and-video app Tiiny weeks later, and Samsung folded its Milk Video experiment before it reached its first anniversary.
The pattern those closures share — and the one Vidme made explicit when it blamed its own shutdown on its inability to compete with Google and Facebook ([[a:924554]]) — is that audience conversation around content has consolidated onto platforms where the viewing and the social layer already live together.
First-order effects
- Users who built viewing histories through TVtag's show check-ins lose their accounts and data at year-end, and the Foursquare-derived check-in model loses its best-known television instance.
- Any networks or advertisers using TVtag as a second-screen engagement surface must find alternatives or fold that function into their own apps.
Second-order effects
- The remaining standalone second-screen and social-video players face the same squeeze documented across this coverage cycle — Blip, Tiiny, and Samsung's Milk Video all exited within roughly a year of each other — pushing them toward acquisition, pivot, or shutdown.
- Attention metrics that social check-in services promised (real-time audience engagement data) migrate back to broadcasters' own apps and to the major platforms' native tools.
Third-order effects
- If the cull continues along the lines Vidme described, the industry structurally separates into content platforms with built-in social layers and everyone else — independent social layers on top of third-party content become unsustainable as a standalone business.
- Check-in mechanics don't disappear but get absorbed: the durable behavior survives inside platform features rather than dedicated apps, echoing how Skype eventually ended its separate TV app ([[a:866157]]) rather than maintaining parallel clients.
The trend: Standalone social and second-screen services built on top of other companies' content are being systematically shut down as engagement consolidates into the major platforms.