You might remember Matcha.tv. The company provided a personal recommendations site and mobile apps focused on helping users find interesting movies and TV shows online based on their own preferences, as well as those of their friends on various social networks.
Well, over the last few days, the website has gone dark, and those who have downloaded the mobile app report that it’s no longer working. At the Matcha.tv website, the owners have left the following notice:
Service Unavailable
Dear users of Matcha, we thank you for using Matcha and hope we were able to improve your TV and movie viewing experience. Unfortunately, from today going forward, this service is no longer available. All personal information collected by Matcha has been deleted. If you have any further questions about your account, please email us at: contact@matcha.tv.
Matcha co-founder and CEO Guy Piekarz didn’t want to comment on the service becoming unavailable, except to say that the company was not “shutting down.” Instead, the startup is apparently working on a “new direction” for its video-discovery service — a direction that was apparently causing things to break. He wrote:
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.
Matcha.tv isn’t the first video app to disappear while its team updated the service. Last summer, video discovery startup Shelby.tv closed to the public, as the startup began to rebuild its backend from the ground up. While some worried that was the end of Shelby.tv, the company soon after announced that it had raised $2.2 million more in funding and has reemerged, both with a “Genius” app for video discovery, as well as a platform for sharing videos that is currently in beta testing.
Matcha was part of Turner’s Media Camp startup incubator for media companies. Its last message to Twitter followers about a month ago said its next version would be “awesome” and includes “lots of enhancements.”