Spotify this morning announced its latest move to expand its marketing and advertising horizons: it has acquired and shut down content recommendation service MightyTV, a startup that (as its name implies) focused on video recommendations, with an app that used a Tinder-style swipe interface to help guide you to TV and film choices compatible with your own tastes. As part of the deal, MightyTV’s founder and CEO Brian Adams will become Spotify’s VP of technology, focused its marketing and advertising platforms.
The company declined to disclosed the terms of the deal. The company launched less than a year ago and had raised just over $4 million, according to CrunchBase. The deal includes MightyTV’s team of eight, who will be based across Spotify’s New York City, Toronto and Stockholm offices.
Adams, notably, was the co-founder and CEO of AdMeld, an advertising optimization platform for publishers that was acquired by Google in 2011, reportedly for $400 million. He then joined Google to run the Doubleclick Publisher Platform, before leaving to start his own company again in 2015.
MightyTV’s Tinder-style mobile app for iOS and Android let you quickly indicate whether you liked or disliked a given title, which helped customize MightyTV’s suggestions to your own personal tastes. As with Tinder, the idea is that the app’s recommendations would then improve over time, the more you used the product.
From a consumer perspective, what made MightyTV interesting was not necessarily its Tinder-like interface — though that was fun — but that it combined different approaches to making its suggestions, combining both those that come from the aggregated user ratings as well as those that better understood one’s individual tastes.
Spotify earlier this month acquired another technology startup, Sonalytic, which also…