14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s purchase of Matcha.tv, now confirmed, has remained a bit of a mystery for most of us. Moreover, the details that have been floating around regarding the acquisition are utterly wrong, well-placed sources say.
Quoted by TechCrunch, these “very reliable sources” revealed that the purchase price wasn’t between $1 million (€750.000) and $1.5 million (€1.124.000), but rather between $10 million (€7.500.000) and $15 million (€11.240.000).
“Nor was it an acqui-hire; this was about the product Matcha built and about the specific recipe for video recommendations it put together via its proprietary algorithm, according to one source close to the matter,” the sources reportedly said.
According to the same people, Matcha’s customer-targeting methodology isn’t new. Companies like Squrl, Fanhattan and Dijit are doing pretty much the same thing, Matcha’s systems are mature.
According to the sources, “Matcha was acquired after testing numerous approaches to generating recommendations, right at the point where it had refined its algorithm such that it saw an explosion in user growth.”
The company’s pairing algorithms – “that drove the right content to the right users” – worked best. Apple was impressed, so they bought them.
Many believe that Matcha’s work will pave the way for an upgraded Apple TV experience. However, the situation is a lot like the time when Apple bought Chomp, an application discovery service.
It’s quite likely that Apple will simply feed Matcha’s algorithms to the iTunes Store in order to serve up content in a much more efficient manner. For Apple, $15 million (€11.240.000) is pocket change.
The Cupertino giant instructs representatives to answer inquiries with this exact statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
You’ll remember that Dropbox was once small. And some of you will also remember that Dropbox actually refused to be bought by Apple.