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Atmosphere TV Raises $25 Million To Stream Silent Ad-Supported Content In Bars And Dentist Offices Across America



It’s been more than a year since many Americans have sat inside a bar or restaurant, casually watching a silent TV play in the background. But as the nation recovers from pandemic lockdowns, one startup is raising money to capture patrons’ attention upon their return.

Atmosphere TV—a streaming platform that provides a range of audio-optional content supported by subscriptions and advertising—has raised a $25 million Series B round from Valor Equity Partners at a new valuation of $275 million. The funding comes less than a year after a $14 million Series A round in April 2020, just weeks after state and local lockdowns went into effect.

While Atmosphere streams through Apple TV devices, the company got its start with Roku, offering thousands of bars and restaurants a chance to stream ambient content for free, rather than through cable for a fee. Meanwhile, advertisers could buy ad placements directly based on location and channel selection to help them reach their target audiences.

Since spinning out of Chive Media Group—best known for its ChiveTV, which now lives as a channel within Atmosphere—in 2018, the Austin-based startup has expanded to more than 50 channels, along with branded content from companies like Red Bull and GoPro.

ChiveTV got its start in the viral video space, but the company didn’t want to stay there. Cofounder and CEO Leo Resig says the move into venues was partially due to “seeing our peers get burned and us getting burned by the platforms like YouTube,” as platforms like Facebook and Google could change a company’s distribution on a whim.

“We didn’t try to compete for in-home eyeballs,” Resig says. “There’s just no way we could be a contender as a standalone (over-the-top streaming) app, but what we did was we provided Roku sicks to thousands of bars.”

Because Covid-19 restrictions forced bars and restaurants to shut down to varying degrees for much of 2020, Atmosphere has spent the past year pivoting to places that people have continued to frequent: auto repair shops, medical offices, veterinary clinics and dentist offices. In the process, the company doubled its customers to 13,000 with plans to add another 20,000 this year for a total of 30,000 by 2022—up from just 2,000 in 2018.

While Atmosphere TV says it now reaches 17 million people per month in the U.S. across its network, the goal is to reach 50 million by the end of 2021. On the advertiser front, there are 100 direct advertisers and thousands that reach Atmosphere TVs through programmatic media buys.

Now, Atmosphere hopes to go beyond viral content and into audio-free news, recently hiring Blake Sabatinelli, the former CEO of Newsy, to create the division as COO with a goal of getting into airports, hotels and college campuses. The funding will help build out that division and also to expand Atmosphere TV’s national sales teams.

“Our mantra is distribution at all costs,” Resig says. “We need more audience reach. We need to be the elephant in the room. We need to be a must-buy. People forget that not long ago Snapchat was a teen sexting app…when you’re too big to ignore, the media buys come.”

Valor, which invested an initial $5 million in Atmosphere last year, has been impressed by its growth and decided to move the company into its growth fund. Jonathan Shulkin, a partner at Valor, describes Atmosphere’s ability to grow distribution even during the pandemic as “highly odd.”

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