Philo online TV service expanding beyond colleges
Philo, a San Francisco company named after the inventor of television, is graduating its online streaming TV service aimed at college students to older cost-cutting audiences.
Philo is offering a package of 35 popular entertainment networks starting at $16 a month, less than similar services like Sling TV. The company is using technology it built from an 8-year-old TV streaming service now available at more than 70 colleges around the country.
The company is hoping to take advantage of the wave of TV viewers who are reducing or cutting ties with traditional pay-TV subscriptions. However, Philo is not including sports channels.
Sports and broadcast TV networks have traditionally charged higher fees to cable and satellite networks for the rights to carry their programming.
“Live sports brings a lot of costs,” said Philo CEO Andrew McCollum, one of Facebook’s founding members. “If you’re not interested in that and if you want to get these entertainment channels, you end up having to sign up for a package that includes a huge amount of price devoted to sports content.”
Instead, Philo is concentrating on entertainment networks, including A&E, AMC, Animal Planet, BBC America, BET, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, History Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon and the Travel Channel. For an additional $4 per month, subscribers get nine more channels, including the Cooking Channel and Discovery Family.
The company has deals with Viacom, Discovery Communications, EW Scripps and A&E Networks (a joint venture of Hearst, publisher of The Chronicle, and a unit of Disney).
Philo, which started as Tivli
in 2009 at Harvard, sells an online TV service to universities to offer as part of a package of student residential services.
This is the first time that Philo, which moved to San Francisco in 2015, has aimed at a wider audience. It comes at a time when TV viewers are increasingly turning to online sources. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, MLB TV, HBO Now, Starz, YouTube Red, Showtime, CBS All Access and Sling TV are the top 10 online TV video services, according to a report released last week by Parks Associates.
At the same time, the U.S. cable TV industry lost about 1 percent of its subscribers last year, but increased its broadband subscriptions by about 5 percent, according to an October report from Moody’s Investors Service.
So despite an increasingly crowded field of online TV services, McCollum believes it’s not too late for Philo, which plans to add a social networking layer to the service early next year.
“We’re very much closer to the begining of this transition, not the end,” he said.
Philo is named after Philo T. Farnsworth, who as a 21-year-old inventor broadcast the first television image — a straight line — from his laboratory at 202 Green St. in North Beach on Sept. 7, 1927.
McCollum said he tried to lease that building to house Philo, but settled for a South of Market office.
“I feel like we’re sort of picking up where Philo Farnsworth left off,” McCollum said. “It’s nice we can do some little homage to him through the name of the company. We’re respectful and proud of our namesake.”
Philo, which includes DVR services, is available on computers using the Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox browsers, and on iPhones and iPads. Philo also works on Roku streaming media devices, but not yet on Apple TV.