Dijit buys Miso’s assets as social TV space consolidates

The rumors are true, after all:Dijit Media, the company behind the Nextguide TV guide app, is buying social TV pioneer Miso’s assets. The acquisition, which was announced by Dijit Friday, doesn’t include any of Miso’s remaining eight employees, but Miso’s co-founder and CEO Somrat Niyogi will become an advisor to Dijit. The move is another sign that the social TV space, which has brought us dozens of startups with similar ideas and products, is ripe for consolidation.

Miso was one of the first companies to take Foursquare’s idea of checking into locations to the media space, offering its users to check into TV shows instead. “They invented social TV,” Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman said during an interview Wednesday. But Miso failed to get enough traction beyond its initial user base, was quickly surpassed by competitor GetGlue.

Niyogi also had his own doubts about check-ins as a core offering, and the company went on to try a few other products: Miso Sideshows allowed anyone to curate and author second-screen content that can be synchronized with existing TV shows, and Quips enabled users to share key moments of their favorite TV show episodes with others.

Dijit said Friday that it is going to continue to support the core Miso check-in platform as well as Miso Sideshows, but that Quips are going to be shut down just two months after the launch of the product. Miso had raised a total of $ 5.5 million from Google Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Koshla Ventures and others. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Toeman told me that the acquisition brings Dijit a lot of intellectual property and technology, as well as Miso’s existing user base. He didn’t give specifics on the number of users of either Nextguide or Miso, but said that both company’s products together amount to a user base in the “low millions.”

Miso’s acquisition comes just a few weeks after social TV startup Viggle tried to buy GetGlue. That acquisition fell through after debt financing necessary to close the deal reportedly didn’t materialize.