Ad-supported streaming service Xumo says it now has 5.5 million monthly users after adding distribution deals with LG and Comcast Xfinity.
Xumo CEO Colin Petrie-Norris told Business Insider (in an interview spotted by the Streamable) that his company saw 300% year-over-year growth in revenue during the first quarter of 2019. In addition to its deals with LG and Comcast, Xumo will also be integrated with T-Mobile’s TVision Home pay TV service launching this year.
Xumo is available on several smart TV manufacturers’ sets as well as on Android, iOS and Roku devices. The company has yet to launch on Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV, but Petrie-Norris said a Fire TV app is coming soon. The company is anticipating further distribution deals this year and has set a goal to reach 80% of U.S. households by the end of 2019.
RELATED: Xumo could be the next AVOD to be acquired
Last summer, Xumo reported a 325% rise in viewership and a 90% increase in user consumption.
"We attribute Xumo's tremendous success to several factors—a focus on delivering free, best-in-class content to a rapidly expanding consumer base, and by providing significant opportunities to advertisers who leverage our insights to engage highly segmented audiences in more targeted, measurable ways," Petrie-Norris said.
But Xumo is still trailing some of its AVOD competitors. Last week, Pluto TV (which was recently acquired by Viacom) said that it now has more than 15 million monthly active users. In January during CES, Amazon said its Fire TV platform had more than 30 million active users. In the same month, Roku announced that it had more than 27 million active accounts.
While OTT advertising still represents a small portion of overall TV advertising spend, many anticipate the OTT advertising opportunity will grow over the next few years. That could be leading some media companies to sniff around Xumo as a potential acquisition target.
According to Variety, Xumo is being circled by some potential buyers including Sinclair. Neither Xumo nor Sinclair would confirm the discussions to the publication.
For Sinclair, a move to buy Xumo would deepen its ongoing efforts around ad-supported streaming. After putting a management team in place last year, Sinclair earlier this year officially launched STIRR, a free, ad-supported streaming service that includes local programming, national news, entertainment, sports and an on-demand library.