Atmosphere Says Its Digital OOH Streaming Network Now Reaches 100M Viewers Monthly

March 16, 2023 by Dave Haynes

The Austin-based digital OOH streaming platform Atmosphere says it just hit a major milestone this week, with its installed footprint now reaching 100 million unique monthly viewers in places like bars, fast food restaurants, gyms and waiting rooms.

The company says that represents almost 5X growth in its audience in the past year. It says it is now in 50,000 venues globally and is adding 5,000 new locations per month.

That kind of scale would be head-exploding for a conventional digital signage or DOOH network, but is possible because Atmosphere has its streaming app on Apple TV boxes, so when a new venue signs up, it gets a free set-top box sent to it. The end-user just plugs it into a TV already in place, connects to WiFi, and launches the app.

Atmosphere says that means its platform, which features a lineup of over 60 free ad-supported streaming (TV) channels with audio-optional content, is reaching more viewers than many free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platforms designed to be watched at home.

Atmosphere offers its ad-supported platform to businesses for free.

“It’s exciting to be a part of a company that is redefining the notion of connected TV,” says Atmosphere Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Spicer, an industry veteran and former ad sales exec at Turner and WarnerMedia who joined the company last October. “It’s also inspiring to see that Atmosphere is reaching 100 million monthly viewers outside of their home in an untapped and highly underutilized space for marketers, leaving Atmosphere at the forefront to scale this particular audience that no other streaming platform to date can.”

This is a business model that’s been around as long as digital signage, and has mostly failed. The big difference now, versus the past, is that broadband is almost ubiquitous, streaming is commonplace, end-users are very conditioned to activating apps on smart displays and set-top boxes, and media play-out units cost less than $200.

Years ago, these kinds of place-based networks cost a fortune to put in place and had to, in most cases, include the screen, the mount, a PC as media player, and quite likely the hardware and monthly bill for connectivity separate from the venue’s own Internet (because Internet speeds were much slower then). What costs $200 now probably cost 20X that in 2003, and media buyers were looking at people selling time on early DOOH networks as though they had three heads.