AioTV’s new platform is changing the way we watch TV

Innovacorp, the Nova Scotia government’s innovation agency, will announce a $1-million investment in aioTV, a revolutionary platform that allows access to a range of video channels on a handheld device or computer.

Greg Phipps, Innovacorp’s director of investment, today confirmed posts that appeared on a few tech websites in the U.S. last week outlining the investment. AioTV (short for All-In-One Television) is the brainchild of Michael Earle, a native Haligonian who once worked for EastLink and has since moved to Denver, Colo. The company and its five founding partners—Don Oram, Michael Dogan, Jamie Redman, Nicholas Oram, and Nathan Myles—are based in the Halifax area, and the company has established its office in Innovacorp’s Technology Innovation Centre in Dartmouth.

Phipps says that Innovacorp was drawn to the project because it offers a solution to the struggle for an audience between free video (such as YouTube), live linear TV (traditional networks), and video on demand (Netflix). “Everybody is looking for a model that they can monetize, and none of them [content providers] offers all three,” says Phipps. “AioTV is the first we’ve found to offer one platform that accommodates all these streams and resembles a TV. We think it’s a hot, hot space.”

Phipps adds that tech giants such as Apple and Google are interested in developing TV products and broadband providers are trying to figure out the formula for offering and monetizing a complete suite of video products. AioTV could appeal to all of them.

The company already offers its service for Apple iPads, PCs, and Macs, and it will soon extend its capability to include Android and Google TV. It has also cut a deal with Mexico's Maxcom Telecomunicaciones to use aioTV’s platform to include cable TV channels, video on demand, and Internet content in its Yuzu service, which reaches more than 350,000 subscribers. Maxcom launched the service last month and charges an $11 per month premium to use it.

Phipps is a former investment manager with the Business Development Bank of Canada; he got to know Earle when Innovacorp and the BDC invested in the entrepreneur’s previous venture, Halifax-based V1 Labs. That company didn’t succeed, but Phipps grew to respect Earle as an entrepreneur and believes his new venture offers great potential.

In backing Earle again, Phipps and his colleagues are adhering to a school of thought in the VC world that says an entrepreneur with one or two failures will do better in the future and is easier to work with than someone who has had nothing but success. Phipps says the $1-million funding is a seed round, and that aioTV will be looking to raise more money in the second or third quarters of 2012.

Peter Moreira is the principal of Entrevestor.com, a website with news and analysis on investment and entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada.