Evoca, a fledgling TV service delivering channels via ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology, warned it will be forced to shutter service at the end of the year absent new funding.
Started in 2018, Evoca on Wednesday alerted consumers with a post on their website, spotted by Light Reading, citing challenges including the global pandemic, supply chain issues and inflation.
“Our resourceful team responded with hard work and a commitment to champion our mission to bring the best TV to our communities. We have seen tremendous growth and have thousands of loyal subscribers,” Evoca stated. “However, this is a difficult economy for a company like ours to raise the funding that we need to grow. Should we be unable to raise more capital, we are sad to say that Evoca TV will discontinue operations and programming on December 31st, 2022.”
It went on to say service will continue through December but the company won’t be accepting any new subscribers.
Evoca first launched in Boise, Idaho just a couple of years ago and is available in a handful of markets, focusing on regional sports and local content. It touts a 60-channel offering of broadcast, live sports and entertainment for $25 per month, plus the cost of a receiver ($5 to rent or $250 to buy), with no contract. Over the summer when Evoca expanded into Portland, it introduced a discount when customers bundled Dish’s Sling TV with the broadcaster’s service.
At the time, Evoca CEO and President Todd Achilles told Fierce Video that the company was the first to crack the code on the skinny bundle of local content and regional sports, with Sling TV’s national channels serving as a complement.
As of May, Evoca was available in markets in Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado and Michigan, and had plans to reach “tens of millions of U.S. households over the next few years.”
A shutdown of Evoca could be a hit to NextGen TV, a technology that broadcasters are looking to as a way to deliver enhanced TV and other services more efficiently and one that Evoca’s young TV service could serve as a proof point for.
Instead of the public internet that streaming is delivered over, Evoca’s service is an IP-based multichannel service using the NEXTGEN TV (ATSC 3.0) standard to distribute channels over available broadcast spectrum. The provider had been serving up high-definition channels and was one of the only to deliver 4K broadcast channels in the U.S. Last year Evoca tapped Commscope for hybrid Android TV set-top boxes.
Of ATSC 3.0, Achilles in an earlier interview with Fierce noted it’s essentially over-the-air (OTA) converged with streaming and OTT elements.
“This is like a whole new way to deliver TV into homes, to break through all of these unnecessarily expensive services and just deliver a great bundle,” he said in May. “That’s what people want.”
Evoca has been focused on Western U.S. markets with fewer options for affordable pay TV offerings. It also put a strong emphasis on regional sports in some markets – such as ROOT Sports in Oregon and Washington and inking a deal to offer Altitude Sports regional network for live Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche games in Denver.
Major broadcasters like Sinclair have also been eyeing NextGen TV, having launched the technology in 34 markets as of October, making it available in 62% of households in Sinclair’s footprint.
Tegna, meanwhile, is shifting to ATSC 3.0 on a market-by-market basis. In August Standard Media CEO Deborah McDermott told Fierce Video the technology, while still in early days, “has huge opportunities going forward,” including to expand content, interaction with audiences, and enhanced targeting capabilities, along with non-broadcast related efforts. Standard General last week inched closer to securing a greenlight for its pending $8.6 billion acquisition of Tegna when an interagency regulatory committee at the FCC said it had no objection if the commission were to approve the deal.