GetGlue was ahead of its time, and quickly fell behind the times.

The standalone TV check-in app allowed users to follow certain shows, check in to shows to chat about them with other fans, and share what TV they were watching with a wider community of TV fans. GetGlue understood that people want to share their TV watching activity on social media. Other services emerged that did much the same thing. Another second screen app, IntoNow, was purchased by Yahoo in 2011 and shut down earlier this month — folded into Yahoo's wider TV-related offerings. 

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we describe how the second screen industry is consolidating, as a slew of different social TV services whittle down to a select few, and big-time social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, push further into social TV. 

Now that i.TV has bought GetGlue and is relaunching it with beefed-up content, that consolidation appears to be firmly under way. 

BI Intelligence has found that people do love using their phones and checking social media as they watch TV. But that doesn't mean that they want to watch program-related content on their devices. Show-themed and second screen apps that ask audiences to open an app during shows and sync to TV in order to deliver content tie-ins are similarly asking too much of audiences. 

In the report, we take stock of how far the second screen industry has come, and what will define it in the future. We look at mobile-social behavior and how it overlaps with the second-screen trend, and reveal the data behind consumer shopping on mobile for products they see advertised on TV.  


Here's a chart from the report: