Philo

Philo (formerly Tivli) is an American internet television company currently based in San Francisco, California, that was first founded at Harvard University in 2010 by Tuan Ho and Nicholas Krasney. Investors in the company include HBO, Andrew McCollum, and Mark Cuban. The company and its service is named in honor of one of the pioneering engineers of television, Philo T. Farnsworth. , their OTT streaming television service has over 800,000 subscribers. History Early history (2010–2016) 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 (Boston area) 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.