Apple acquires Matcha

Back in May, Matcha went dark. No announcement, no explanation. The app just disappeared.

Co-founder and CEO Guy Piekarz told TechCrunch they weren't shutting down, just heading in a new direction - a direction that was apparently causing things to break.

The hardest thing, by far, in the new direction we're going was taking down the service, which we've been building for the last couple of years. We apologize for dissappointing our users and plan to provide something better in the future.

That was it. We now know the shutdown and the acquisition were the same event - TechCrunch's sources say Apple had already closed the deal in May. The app going offline was the handover.

Today Apple confirmed it. VentureBeat broke the story. Standard response: they buy small companies, don't discuss plans.

I have a personal connection here. Ilan Ben-Zeev, Matcha's CTO and co-founder, is one of those people I consider extended family. I knew the algorithm was good. Now Apple knows it too.

What did Apple buy? Matcha aggregated content from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Prime, HBO, and cable providers into a single interface with a unified queue and smart recommendations. The purchase price was probably not the $1-1.5M VentureBeat originally reported. TechCrunch's sources put it at least eight figures, likely $10-15M. Not an acqui-hire. Apple bought the product, and specifically the algorithm.

The algorithm combined two things most competitors treated separately: collaborative filtering (what people with similar tastes watch) and the social graph (what your actual friends watch). Matcha had been A/B testing approaches right up until the acquisition and had just "found the answer" - an explosion in user growth that put it in the top 15 Entertainment apps on the App Store. Apple bought the solved problem.

The unified queue was interesting too. Matcha called it a "smart cloud DVR" - it tracked what you'd seen across services, synced with Netflix's watch history, and knew where you were in a series. No recording, no box to manage. Just state, stored in the cloud. There have been Apple TV rumors around exactly this kind of feature.

Look at the $99 Apple TV today. It's a closed box. You jump between apps manually. Netflix is a silo. iTunes is a silo. Tim Cook called it a beloved hobby last October, then told NBC's Brian Williams in December that TV was an "area of intense interest". He also disclosed in May that Apple had sold 13 million Apple TVs - with roughly half of those in just the first five months of this year. The hobby is actually selling.

The Guardian draws the comparison to SoundJam MP, the music player Apple bought in 2000 and stripped down into the first version of iTunes. Matcha probably doesn't survive as a brand. Its DNA might power the next Apple TV interface the same way SoundJam's DNA powered a decade of music. That's a more interesting frame than "Apple TV gets better search". It's about what Apple does with a solved problem once it owns it.

Two years from now, when you ask Siri to find something to watch and it searches across every service at once, you'll know where that came from.

מברוק, Ilan.