Atmosphere launches Atmosphere News
October 5, 2021
Atmosphere, a specialist in streaming TV for businesses, has announcedthe launch of Atmosphere News. The new channel was purpose-built to provide a TV news experience optimized for out-of-home locations, incorporating a short-form, audio-optional narrative format that avoids talking heads, subtitles and voiceover narration to inform viewers. Atmosphere News is also free of the analysis and opinion-heavy approach that has become a mainstay of traditional cable TV news, providing venue owners with a facts-only, easy-to-understand TV news solution that serves all audiences.
The Atmosphere News team is led by digital and TV news veteran Micah Grimes, who joined the company in June from NBC News. The launch of Atmosphere News represents the company’s largest, single-channel investment to date, offering hourly updates and coverage of 40 to 50 stories each day at launch.
“The out-of-home TV news market represents a huge untapped opportunity that isn’t really being served by existing options,” said Leo Resig, co-founder and CEO of Atmosphere. “With Atmosphere News we’re introducing a presentation format that, unlike traditional news, is optimized for viewing in public spaces and that venue owners can screen without creating division among their clientele. Once business owners see just how effective Atmosphere News is at delivering today’s stories without any larger agenda, they won’t be returning to cable.”
For marketers, Atmosphere News provides the opportunity to align their brands with highly sought-after, politically unbiased, brand safe news content. The Atmosphere platform also enables brands to deliver their message to the exact right audience at the exact right time with targeting across geography, daypart and, unique to Atmosphere, venues: hotels, corporate offices, point-of-care facilities, restaurants, and more.
Developed to engage out-of-home audiences across Atmosphere’s installed footprint of more than 14,000 retail locations including restaurants, bars, gyms, hotels and doctor’s offices, Atmosphere News joins a 50+ channel lineup of varied family-friendly programming designed for every business environment. The launch of Atmosphere News builds on the company’s momentum over the past year, which includes a $25 million Series B funding round led by Valor Equity Partners that valued the company at $275 million dollars.
Launched in 2019, Atmosphere streams an aggregate of more than 250,000 hours of programming per day across 53 channels of both owned and partner content, reaching over 25 million unique visits every month. Atmosphere retail clients include Westin, Hilton, McDonald’s and thousands of other businesses of all sizes. Atmosphere provides venues with TV hardware and programming for free, monetizing its content through its proprietary advertising platform and through paid subscriptions. Paid subscribers are granted access to a digital signage manager, allowing them to run their own ads during programming breaks.