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You’re in a bar, waiting on a friend. Where do your eyes go? The muted TV above you with captions running across it or the comforting phone cradled in your hand?
If Blake Sabatinelli has his way, it’s the TV, though he knows it will take something other than a muted broadcast to hold your eyes on it.
Sabatinelli is the newly made CEO of Atmosphere TV, a company that produces a network of over 50 FAST channels designed to run with the sound off and grab your attention in an ambient fashion. Atmosphere recalibrates news, sports and myriad other content types into sound-free iterations, monetizing exclusively with ads that do the same thing.
In this Talking TV conversation, Sabatinelli explains what makes for good ambient TV, how his business model works and how the company justifies its $1 billion valuation in a current funding round.
Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.
Michael Depp: Atmosphere TV is an interesting startup in the world of streaming TV. It’s a streaming service that functions as a kind of ambient TV, something you might see in the background, in a bar or restaurant at the game’s not on, for instance. In all, it has over 60 original and partner channels.
I’m Michael Depp, editor of TVNewsCheck, and this is Talking TV. Today, a conversation with Blake Sabatinelli, the newly minted CEO of Atmosphere TV. Atmosphere is in the midst of a $65 million series D funding round, and we’ll talk about