Philo (company)

Philo (formerly Tivli) is an American internet television company currently based in San Francisco, California, that was first founded at Harvard University in 2009. Investors in the company include HBO, Andrew McCollum, and Mark Cuban. The company and its service is named in honor for one of the pioneering engineers of television, Philo T. Farnsworth. 
As of Q1 2021, their OTT streaming television service has over 800,000 subscribers.
History.
Early history.
Philo was originally founded in 2010 as Tivli by Tuan Ho and Nicholas Krasney at Harvard University. It began as an experimental dorm-room streaming project using aluminium foil as a makeshift receiving antenna to "pick up TV signals and deliver them wirelessly to their laptops via a jerry-rigged server". At its launch, the project was intended to be a way to provide a streaming TV service to Harvard University students living on campus. When the service first launched in 2011, a quarter of the Harvard resident population registered for it within the first few weeks of the service.
In 2011, Tivli joined the Harvard Innovation Lab (iLab) as the first company in residence, before finally moving into their own office in Harvard Square in 2013. In 2012, Christopher Thorpe joined as CEO to build out Philo's original university IPTV service. From the earliest days, Philo had aspirations to launch a nationwide streaming TV service, starting in universities. After launching services at Harvard, Philo quickly added additional universities such as Stanford University, Yale University, Texas A&M University and Brown University.
. In 2013, Philo announced a strategic partnership with HBO to provide the HBO GO service to universities. By September 2015, the service was available in 42 universities.
In July 2013, the venture raised a $6.3 million round led by Patrick Chung at venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Among the Series A investors, were Mark Cuban from Radical Investments LP, HBO, Ari Emanuel from William Morris Endeavor and Rho Ventures. The same year the company was rebranded as Philo, from its former name, Tivli.
In 2014, Andrew McCollum, a founding member of Facebook, succeeded Christopher Thorpe as CEO to further expand Philo beyond providing university IPTV services and launch a direct-to-consumer over-the-top streaming service called Philo. After securing their Series B round in 2015, Philo relocated to San Francisco, California.
In June 2015, Philo raised $10 million in a Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates, with joint investment from HBO, Rho Ventures, Xfund, CBC New Media Group, as well as Andrew McCollum.
Recent history (2017-present).
On November 14, 2017, Philo launched a new live tv OTT streaming television service in the United States. The service is available via TVs, computers, tablets, and phones. The service includes channels from A&E Networks, AMC Networks, Discovery, Inc., and the legacy networks of Viacom (prior to its 2019 reunion with CBS Corporation to form ViacomCBS), all of which also became joint owners of the service with a combined $25 million investment before this launch.
The service is noted to have no local television stations or sports networks, though it does offer news services through BBC World News (which is distributed by AMC) and financial news channel Cheddar.
In October 2018, Philo added Hallmark Channel and its sister channels, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries and Hallmark Drama.
In February 2020, Google Fiber announced it would only offer new customer options to sign up for streaming services. It backed YouTube TV and fuboTV at the time and added the $20 package of Philo's 61-channel as an option. Adding Philo to the list of Google Fiber was described as a way to help the virtual MVPD "keep its growth streak going". At the time, Philo had 750,000 subscribers and the service said that over the year it had grown by 300%.
In June 2020, Philo added Epix and Starz as premium add-ons, with the on-demand library for each service to be made available.
On March 29, 2021, T-Mobile US announced a partnership with Philo to offer a discount on the service when bundled with its wireless plans.