Today San Francisco-based second Dijit Media, creators of second screen app NextGuide and Dijit Remote, announced its acquisition of second screen company Miso, which makes apps and SideShows, which both let fans capture scenes from a TV show, and add their own captions and commentary. As part of the deal, Dijit will continue to support the Miso mobile app and its SideShow functionality, however, it will effectively be shutting down the standalone Quips app, with Miso founder Somrat Niyogi joining Dijit as an advisor.
Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman and GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi decided to embark on the move after realizing they had a shared strategic vision. Rumors of the acquisition were first reported by TechCrunch on January 18th, and the company confirmed it today but didn’t release any financial details of the transaction. In an interview with BetaKit, Toeman outlines how his company believes the TV landscape is changing and how Dijit is poised to take advantage of it.
“We are in a transformative era of TV, we’re seeing a slow and steady shift where the emphasis of TV was a live thing, where today there is a less priority around live viewing. Or to rephrase it, there’s an increase in catch-up binge and streaming viewing,” said Toeman. “You hear more and more of people who watch a whole series in a week…our theory is in that world, the problem that will increasingly affect people is discovery.”
Looking to impact the discovery process and experience for when people watch TV and movies, Dijit launched its first app, Dijit Remote, in 2011 to let users control their TV with their smartphone and get personalized recommendations, and integrate their viewing with social networks. Its most recent app is NextGuide, an iPad TV listings guide that lets users aggregate content from services like Amazon Instant Video, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Netflix, to provide one-click viewing and what the company refers to as ‘hyper-personalized’ recommendations. The company recently updated its Dijit Remote app and has started connecting users’ profiles with their viewing history and likes, something it also plans to do in the short-term with Miso’s apps.
Its business model includes three primary revenue streams, including affiliate revenue from promoted content, data mining, where it leverages its data to provide insights into behavioral trends on its app, and lastly advertising. Toeman believes media channels and producers will increasingly want to leverage its users as part of what he referred to as “tune in advertising” to promote new or existing shows and movies.
Today’s acquisition news comes on the heals of Viggle’s failed acquisition of second screen player GetGlue, which was announced and then called off earlier this year. Though both parties remained tight-lipped about the exact details, speculation and information obtained from Viggle’s financial statements pointed to its inability to come up with the necessary cash for the deal to go through.
Miso has struggled to settle on a product, pivoting from a TV check-in app to the SideShows app, and most recently the Quips app. Whether its products can find a permanent home with Dijit’s user base is one question, but the larger one is whether Dijit can compete against the larger players in the second screen space. With tablets expected to outsell PCs and 52 million tablets sold over the past holiday season alone, second screen startups are popping up to cater to the new tablet-equipped viewers, with players in the space including zeebox, Peel, and Stevie, and yap.TV.
Up next for the company the team will be looking to bring its NextGuide iPad app to additional platforms down the road. While other social TV apps will continue to compete for how users interact with shows as they watch them live, Dijit wants to be the go-to source for those who prefer to watch or binge at their own convenience. Whether they can incorporate Miso’s apps and make its SideShows feature more popular among viewers remains to be seen.
