This Digital OOH Network Has Gone From Zero to 1,300 Sites Since April

October 18, 2016 by Dave Haynes

chivetv-new

I don’t know how many fledgling out of home media companies – let’s just say MANY – have tried to make a go of putting digital OOH ad screens in bars.

Most have failed, learning the hard way that the media ad sales is harder than it looks, and that getting revenues to reliably surpass operating costs is a tough, endless task.

So it’s interesting to learn that an online media company with a wildly popular online brand has made the jump, with some real apparent success, using about as low-rent a solution as one might dream up. User-generated content running off a $49 Roku stick, plugged into an existing TV in a bar, and using the bar’s WiFi.

CHIVE TV started in April and is already in 1,300 bars across the US, and the parent company, Resignation Media, just announced it has joined the Digital Place Based Advertising Association.

The DPAA, announcing the new member, says in a release:

Since its debut in April, the network has been distributed to more than 1,300 bars and other “points of party” across the U.S., and it continues to grow rapidly as evidenced by a recent distribution agreement between Resignation and Royal Caribbean, the world’s largest global cruise line, which will feature CHIVE TV programming on all 25 ships in its fleet.   

Earlier this month, Resignation Media announced a partnership with VentureFuel, Inc. to develop strategic alliances with Fortune 500 advertisers.

“The speed at which CHIVE TV has attained national scale speaks to how strongly their content resonates with millennial males,” said Barry Frey, President & CEO, DPAA. “This is a highly desired target for advertisers and all of us at the DPAA are looking forward to working with Resignation Media to provide more tools to effectively monetize their audience.”

“With our VentureFuel partnership and now our DPAA membership, we are well equipped to hit the ground running in our new initiative to bring advertisers on board to the CHIVE TV network. We look forward to working with Barry and his team,” says Leo Resig, the CEO of Resignation Media.

Millennials will know this, but the whole chive thing has escaped my late 50s white guy attention until now. I see chive and I think sour cream and baked potatoes. The Chive is a website that curates and presents videos and animated gifs – seemingly with a focus on people being idiots, women’s breasts, and animals or little kids being adorable.

The lead item on the Canuck edition this morning reads: Douchebag BMW driver gets a dose of karma (Video)

The premise of CHIVE TV is “a free TV channel that features all the best video content from theCHIVE.com and more. CHIVE TV’s intense, compelling and hilarious videos are designed specifically for bar audiences.”

Bar owners are not confronted with any upfront or ongoing costs, and sold on the premise that goofy adorable content will keep people in the bar a bit longer, perhaps ordering another round. The Roku stick gets mapped to the “channel” in the Roku system, and plays a repeating five-hour loop that gets updated weekly.

Here’s a live stream: http://chive.tv/live-stream/

I’m not the audience or target market, but this seems kinda brilliant in its simplicity. The capital costs are crazily low. There are NO operating costs on the premise. Content gets delivered by Roku’s cloud. And the content is free – from a brand already familiar to the audience.

Resig will be an interview subject at the DPAA’s annual Video Everywhere Summit next week, October 27th, in New York.

  1. Bryan Mongeau says:

    At least part of their secret sauce seems to be based on paying college kids to go out and get the bars signed up themselves.

    http://chive.tv/cut-the-cord/

    I wonder what a bar owner’s bandwidth bill looks like with these sticks always streaming off the network. Could be hundreds of GBs per month.

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