Atmosphere, a streaming service provider for businesses, reached a content agreement with the PGA Golf Tour that brings a new channel featuring highlights and dedicated golf programming to its lineup.
The Atmosphere platform is live in over 45,000 businesses worldwide and has an audience of 60 million monthly viewers. Its lineup of 60 ad-supported channels, which span sports, news and lifestyle, caters to audiences gathering in places like bars, restaurants and other out-of-home settings with TV content that’s audio-optional.
Atmosphere COO Blake Sabatinelli explained how the company’s platform serves as an alternative to cable subscriptions for businesses.
“Programming through cable is designed for the home, often featuring talking heads and needing audio to be watched effectively, which is often less than ideal for business environments such as bars, restaurants, gyms, and doctor's offices,” Sabatinelli told Fierce Video via email. “Atmosphere curates content that is built for the out-of-home environment: short form, audio-optional and highly visual, and proven to increase engagement in business settings.”
The new PGA Tour channel offers a combination of tournament coverage highlights, recaps and footage from iconic PGA Tour moments. PGA Tour highlights are also being added to Atmosphere Sports, the platform’s sports channel launched earlier this year.
“Atmosphere has built an innovative platform with significant reach and an active, engaged audience,” said Norb Gambuzza, PGA Tour SVP of Media and Gaming, in a statement. “We’re excited to work with Atmosphere to deliver a dedicated PGA TOUR channel onto its platform with a goal of engaging more fans.”
The addition of PGA Tour content builds on its growing sports content offing, having launched the Atmosphere Sports channel in March, followed by RealMadridTV in September, a channel dedicated to one of Europe’s popular soccer teams and featuring live matches.
In announcing the new channel, Sabatinelli in a statement said golf has been a top ask for its platform.
“With golf being one of the most watched sports in the world, we’re immensely proud to be partnering with the PGA TOUR to provide businesses with a viewing experience tailored to their spaces,” commented Sabatinelli. “The addition of golf to our platform has been one of the biggest requests of our fans, but also one of the hardest to obtain, so to have the world’s most competitive golf tour on Atmosphere shows just how far we’ve come in 2022, and how much further we can grow in 2023.”
Atmosphere also offers a boxing channel called FITE, and a variety of extreme and alternative sports with Red Bull, X Games, and World Chase Tag. According to Sabatinelli the company now counts over 10 sports channels, with more on the way.
Similar to say a FAST platform like Paramount Global’s Pluto TV or Fox’s Tubi, Atmosphere is a free ad-supported streaming service – but differs in that it’s creating and curating TV content meant specifically to be viewed within businesses, he noted.
“For an advertiser, this means Atmosphere delivers the distinct option, unlike existing FAST services, to reach consumers at differentiated moments in their consumer journey, and utilize various targeting capabilities, including venue type, location and time of day,” Sabatinelli told Fierce.
Earlier this year Atmosphere took its pitch, to deliver free streaming channels to venues with its audio-optional content, to Advertising Week in New York.
At the time chief revenue officer Ryan Spicer told Fierce that for some venues Atmosphere provides a full replacement for TV service, while serving as a complement at others.
Atmosphere in January raised $80 million in a Series C funding round led by Sageview Capital.