Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. thank everyone out there for joining us as I like to say each and every time. Thank you for hanging out with us each and every week. Today is another fun special guest. He's actually the second one that I screwed up and you guys will hear that one coming out soon. Blake and I did this recording and then I realized that I had some audio settings wrong. And so I'll just publicly apologize and get flogged on the airwaves. But Blake, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners and I'm excited to have them here. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast where we think to explore cutting edge technology that transforms your restaurants. Today we excited to have Blake Sabatinelli the CEO of Atmosphere TV join us for the show. Blake has had a very cool story of building atmosphere and continuing to revolutionize how in general and a lot of restaurants are engaging with their customers to yet again all of the cool things you guys are doing. create visual content that allows them to enjoy their guest experience and create memorable moments, putting their phones down. And he and I talk quite a bit about what their thesis is and why they create the content that they do and how they go about it. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer for CBS Northstar. We wrote the Northstar Point of Sale Solution for multi-units. Please check us out at cbsnorstar.com. And now onto the episode.

Blake Sabatinelli: happy to do it. you know, if if you don't run into technical issues, that means you're not doing your job at some point in time. ⁓ But I'm Blake Sabatinelli I'm the CEO of Atmosphere TV. I'm also a fan of we have coordinating purples going today, it looks like. ⁓ for thanks for reading my text and making sure that we matched. I've with the company now for ⁓ for years. I started here as the CEO. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Exactly, exactly. I like it.

Blake Sabatinelli: joined ⁓ Atmosphere after a long and not so storied career in the news industry. So they're about 15 years as a news executive. And I get to put cat videos on television, which is such a ⁓ nice of pace.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, because cat videos is something everybody should be spending time thinking about. for that are not familiar with Atmosphere Blake, I I've gotten ⁓ early even kind of when you guys were super, super young in your ⁓ career. connected with one of your guys and I've kind of watched the journey as you guys have continued to expand and modify the product. for those that are not familiar with Atmosphere, I've never heard of it. I know you guys have some brands out there, so why don't you kind of talk through what the core start of the product was and then we'll kind of dig into where you guys have gone over the last number of years.

Blake Sabatinelli: Absolutely. So at our, at the most simple level, we're a TV service for businesses. But we solve a fundamental problem that exists for television for businesses and that we produce content for the, the environment that exists inside of those locations, which typically means you can't have audio. So we've all walked into a bar or restaurant or a gym or any other place, a dentist office, and you walk in and there's a television and it's on mute, just closed captions on, and it's an suboptimal experience. And it doesn't mean the content that's playing there is bad. It just means it was meant for inside the living room where you can have audio where that experience, you know, we're not, we're not going to the gym to watch a procedural. And so, uh, you know, in 2015, the founders of this business walked into a bar and saw that problem, founded a business based on solving a core market need of producing television that was going to be good for the eyes and not necessarily great for the ears.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: and it's been off and running ever since. So we're in 60,000 businesses today. We're watching about 150 million US adults on a monthly basis. Odds are if you walked into any place that's a third space, bar, restaurant, coffee shop, or anything else, and you've seen something that is these incredibly compelling viral videos playing on TV, whether it's our marquee channel, Chive TV, or other channels like Superhuman, our trivia channel, or anything else. But if you've ever found these incredibly captivating entertainment experiences, odds are it's been us.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, and I know you guys have been a huge pioneer kind of in this space because I do think you guys solved this very unique challenge. Talk about kind of the brands, within the portfolio because again, I think that'll lead into our secondary conversation which is where you guys are going. But you talk about Chive TV being kind of the most popular and the one that's most well known and we were teasing at the onset about cat videos. So, know, everybody loves a cute kitten or a dog, you know, bouncing off the walls or whatever else. What is chive and then kind of what are all of the rest of the rest of the the assets that you guys have?

Blake Sabatinelli: Absolutely at the risk of oversimplifying what our content is yes cat videos are a part of it But chive TV is really a collection with the best of the internet So it's a collection that our producers produce here in house of the best videos the things that you're already sending in between you and your friends So those things those oh my gosh moments that you seem like oh my gosh. I got to send this to someone We've built an entire programming strategy around that and it's a channel called chive TV but every business has its own quote unquote atmosphere and the name is kind of a riff on that. So we have channels for everything, whether it's superhuman, which is the most insane people doing the most insane things, guys jumping out of airplanes and flying through rocks and all sorts of crazy stuff or zone TV, which is so great in our gyms. Or even if you think about some of our linear channels, we actually have a live newsroom here. Atmosphere now operates here 24 seven. Atmosphere sports are 24 seven. ⁓ play on what Sports Center used to be, so the best scores, highlights, betting lines, and everything else, the way through stuff like the ⁓ Guinness World Records Channel, Red Bull, and a ton of others. ⁓ We have a channel variety for just about everything, ⁓ whether want it to be fun and goofy or serious and informative.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, I think that that's the part that always baffles me when I think about your guys' product offering is it does fit so many different business models and so many different environments. And so I guess as the CEO, Blake, talk to me a little bit about kind of how you guys even think about the content because it's hard. mean, everybody's able with their smartphones to create content and produce content, but you guys truly elevated to a level production-wise that... Nobody else is doing at this point. So I'd love for you to kind of talk through the what and the why behind doing that because it does really create a compelling environment where people want to go and want to engage and want to dwell in certain places. you're what you said, your third place, ⁓ you know, example.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first and foremost, I, know, there are a lot of credit goes to the amazing content creators that we have partnerships with. So we'll work with thousands and thousands of them every single month to create these channels. ⁓ you know, they produce these amazing, ⁓ these amazing assets. They work with our content acquisition team and then our producers produce that content and, turn it into amazing compilations and other, other assets. ⁓ thesis behind our business is actually very simple though. So we have these amazing content creators exist on the other side. We're an entertainment company. We're here to make sure that people are enjoying the content that they watch every single day. And so the way that we go about this is very, simple. Is this something you would want to watch? Is this something that would make you stop and say, Hey, man, you got to look up from your phone and check out what's happening on the TV. And if it doesn't meet that measure, then it's really hard for us to say it's something that we should be putting on screen in general. And so we're just.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: We have an amazing content production team here. We work with these amazing content producers. I'll say amazing 90 more times because it really is an incredible workflow that they have, but it's a simple, simple premise. Are we going to make someone smile? Are we going to improve someone's life by, know, they're happy to solve it by 10 % right now. Are we just going to, you know, make a little bit of a smile happen? And if we can do that, if we can, if we can meet that threshold, we know that we've done our job and that's whether it's our viral video channels, our amazing hype channels. our news and sports channels. We just want to make sure that we're adding that little oomph every single day and getting people to want to look a little bit more.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, you guys have been successful. know I was sharing before her before I've got, I got a son who's a teenager and every time we go to the, favorite, our favorite Mexican restaurant, he's constantly, I'm like, Hey, you know, look over here. We're having a conversation. He's like, but dude, did you see that guy? Just, know, and, so it's always just kind of this, this funny, ⁓ juxtaposition because I love the entertainment value. And as a father of a teenager, it's hard enough to get his attention. So I pay for food to get his attention and constantly he's talking to me about guys lifting weights or people jumping off the mountains or whatever it might be on the TV. But also I would say the other Mexican restaurant that's a half a mile down the road doesn't have a product like yours and he chooses to, if he has the choice, he'd rather go to the one where he can have the entertainment value even, for us, we don't do phones at the table. while I'm eating, it's like he's not staring at his phone, which we hate that. I hate when I walk into a place. I'd rather than at least be looking up and he's got a glance at the TV and then a conversation and then a glance at the TV. And so I guess talk me through kind of your guys' thought process on that. ⁓ guess even your opinion ⁓ my family dynamics at our favorite restaurant.

Blake Sabatinelli: big fan of big fan of yourself. By the way, I'm not allowed to so there's plenty here in Austin where we're based. We have a couple thousand locations where, pretty well ingrained across the entirety of the city. ⁓ not allowed to ⁓ to an atmosphere location and face the TV because myself ⁓ drifting and and doing the thing. ⁓ I think.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, sometimes we have to move his seat to the opposite side. If they have the shirt TVs on this side, I'm like, dude, you need to sit over here so you're not looking at it. So I appreciate that as well.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. But it's, you know, that's what we're here to do. nothing worse ⁓ going to a bar or walking into a restaurant and seeing people totally heads down. so a great, know, great example of kind of what you're saying. We don't allow phones at the table. Exactly. So that's, you're trying to create that connection, but you walk into a location, people are doing this and there's there's nothing worse. It's terrible for society. So.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: ⁓ Absolutely.

Blake Sabatinelli: Our entire mission is to create content that's so compelling that you put your phone down and you look up because at least you can have a communal experience together. At least you can have that moment where you're, you know, you're sharing a laugh about something or sharing amazement with someone. just having something together. And I applaud you guys. ⁓ Not not sure I applaud you guys turning your son away from it. You we want to make sure he watches it as much as possible. But that's what we're here to do. Like when I said earlier, we're an entertainment company.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. You

Blake Sabatinelli: You know, we're a lot of things. We're this amazing video tech company. We do a lot of things that are really cutting edge. But the core of us is there to just make people want to put their phone down and enjoy the space around them and be part of society. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Well, I think it's going to be positive, quite honestly, for those brands that you guys are in because they're going to have a better experience. The food is good. The entertainment is good. The product is good. The conversation is good. You're talking about the video that's on the screen. And I think it creates an uplift versus sitting there staring at your phone and nobody can give a crap because they're in their own little world.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, exactly. No one wants to advertise against negative things. No one wants to advertise against, you know, gore and terrible stuff that happens on kind of the 24 seven news channels. Like this terrible situation. We're here to put smiles on faces. If you're a brand, you want to be sandwiched between the fuzzy kitten and the guy jumping off with his BMX bike off of a mountain. You want to be associated with those things because A, it gets someone excited and B, it's a happy moment. Like we want to see, we want to be associated with happy moments.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: And it's shareable and it's shared experiences. So I love that. Blake, I'm gonna ask, you guys have pivoted, not pivoted, know, producing content is amazing. Producing content that you guys have got creators out there. I don't say that's fixed, but that's not live and not constantly changing. I guess ⁓ like a easier path than kind of where you guys have gone lately. And I'd love ⁓ a bit of thought on why have you guys gotten into real time, you you alluded to what sports center used to be. When I was a kid, I could sit and listen to ESPN for hours because it was live and I was constantly, it wasn't just talking heads, arguing with each other. It was truly about what was going on within the sporting world. Same with kind of even network news. And it felt like it was a, it was a more relevant experience. And it feels like you guys are trying to step into that realm different than what, at least I remember when you guys, the onset was it was content that got, you know, and it would get played on repeat, you know, every couple of hours or whatever else. So I'd love to kind of. Get in your mindset and why you guys as a business have done that.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yes, I mean, it's we want that direction because that's what some people want. You know, we're here to create programming that works for our business partners and works for the audiences that sit within their businesses. Some people want to see news. Some people want to see sports news. if that's what they want to run, we need to produce it. And it is a little bit different than, working in a, you know, more of a video on demand capacity where we're running a loop and stuff like that. But we're here to give people what they want.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: it's worked out incredibly well for us. Atmosphere Sports is actually our second most watched channel. It's not surprising. People love sports. So not surprising that people want to watch sports highlights. Atmosphere now is one of our top 10 channels. People love to be informed, but people don't to watch divisive content. And so the whole reason that we can do what we do is because we've been very smart about how we've built these channels, how we fill in these channels and how we ⁓ automate them. But we're not ranked

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: That's amazing.

Blake Sabatinelli: or rated by, you know, like Anil said, we don't have to have 24 hours of filling time with the same four stories over and over again. So we provide a real value. We give people an idea of what's happening around the world. don't provide any kind of opinion or, you know, our thoughts around it. like, here's the facts moving on to the next story. And it's ended up working incredibly well for our business operator partners and for the people who would end up watching it.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, and I could see that. ⁓ cause to your point, as you, as you said on the onset, there's a lot of times you walk into a sports bar and can watch kind of what's going on. It's like, it's hard to see the screen and it's not really made for, you know, viewing ⁓ the shoulder times. But that, guess gets me to the next question Blake, which is how do you guys manage both the that's there plus live production sports and entertainment and things that need to be, you know, in front of the cat videos. because it's relevant. It's the national championship game. It's the Super Bowl. Again, we're recording this a couple of days after the Super Bowl. I'm sure usage was down during that ⁓ window, but how do you guys manage and allow the operators that ability to have live broadcast television for when they need it, but also in those periods that they don't, use your guys' content?

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, actually. So the interesting thing about major sporting events is we still see really, really strong usage because we provide an alternative to what's on the television screen there. And if you think about it at its core, we don't just provide them an alternative to what's happening on the TV, on the main, you know, on our pay TV signal. We give them the opportunity via our digital signage tools to advertise what's happening in their businesses every three minutes. So business operators are incentivized to keep us on because we're here. They're helping them advertise. You know, broadly, mean, we do this and we can do this because we're incredibly smart about automations. So we have a large content team here in the Austin, Texas area that works and produces this amazing content. But we've been incredibly thoughtful about how we program the tech to do all the work for us. And so kind of coming back to my earlier statement, we're a lot of things. We're a we're an entertainment company first.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: but we have a great engineering team that's building all sorts of tool sets that allow business operators to automate their processes. So if you're a business operator and you turn us off, that's fine. We're plugged into your HDMI. We won't be serving any content or any ads until you come back online. But the next day, VR zero touch play functionality, we'll go ahead and turn that TV back on for you and make sure that your atmosphere instance is up and running again. That way you're there and able to entertain your customers. So we've been trying to be smart about like not just being great at automating our content, building an amazing platform and product, but also about giving it an opportunity, giving operators an opportunity to not have to think about another thing to turn on and features like zero touch player, a clear indicator of that. We just want to make sure that we're making people's jobs easier.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, no, and I love that idea. And I want to dig in Blake to the idea of kind of how do you guys deploy? But before we go there, I'd love to ask the question, what's in it besides the entertainment value for the operator? When you talked about it, you touched on, you know, kind of some of their advertising and can talk about how and what and where all, you know, that's cool. I got the guy jumping off the, know, BMX bike off the mountain, but now I want to drive behavior within my stores, not just the, Hey, look at the video, but Also, these other things that I know you guys can do. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what does that look like and how do you help them to drive the behavior that they're looking for with their guests and with their staff.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, we have our digital signage tools. Digital signage on our platform is free for our base package. So you can run that ad every six minutes our platform. We can run, think, up to four different creatives throughout the hour. And allow you to do that for free and we help you on board. We help you create. We help you deliver that ad for you. So it's a completely free and streamlined process. You go in, use our free ad creator, you upload your Canva creative or you upload your your existing TV commercial that you already have as a business operator, and you can schedule it and set it off to go and it's quick and easy. We also have digital signage boost, which allows you to double the amount of opportunity. So every three minutes, you'll have an opportunity to advertise your customers ⁓ create an even larger expanded bank of creatives you can choose from. So that's and externally, you also have the opportunity to take those same creatives ⁓ and move to the atmosphere footprint broadly. advertise your restaurant in a radius around you. We'll work with you to build a plan, find an economical way for you to be able to reach consumers in the same super effective way that you're doing folks inside of your dining room or dental office or anything else. And we'll help you drive foot traffic in in a very economical way. So we try to work both interior, inside and outside with business operators to make sure that they're getting the most out of the atmosphere experience. and bringing as much value and business as they possibly can in so that they can maximize what our atmosphere opportunity is for them.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: love that. What kind of results are you guys seeing or what kind of things are you seeing people do on those TVs? I'd love to get a little bit of an understanding. it getting that extra upsell of a margarita? it selling the chocolate cake at the end of the meal? Is it getting them to sign up for loyalty? I guess I'd love to see what are you guys seeing people use those ad spaces for and what kind of results is it driving within the restaurants you guys work with?

Blake Sabatinelli: So they're using it a lot of times to drive promotional products or to drive people back for happy hour. And I have a great kind of case study from one of our QSR partners. They had a special product that they were bringing to market wanted to make sure they were showcasing it as effectively as they possibly could. One of the groups, the large franchisees in this group ran this promotion while others not. And they ended up outperforming the market broadly by like 3X. And so they sold like three times as many of the product because they continuously mentioned it over and over and over again. And that just shows the power of leveraging the televisions that you have inside of your of your establishment and using it as a tool to get people to do something. People are watching, people are paying attention. So there's so much untapped value in making sure that you're leveraging that signage and driving people to an action that you want them to take.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: love that. And I think it's, again, I'll go back to my parenting. I joke my kids all the time. You don't understand how influenced you are by the things that you're watching every day. We talk about it all the time. They're watching YouTube and the ⁓ ads that they're coming in. Amazingly, their birthday list happens to be all fricking ads that were served to them on YouTube ⁓ this week. it's like, but it's human behavior. This is what happens. And back to your point, how do we drive the behavior within the brand? ⁓ Use the assets you already have. in an ethical way to make people aware, because half the time they're not even aware of it. You want to say that your servers are coming and telling them about the new special. You want to see that they're reading the POP that's on the table, you know, the little aphrium that's saying, you know, we've got this new special. But 99 times out of 100, they're not. But this motion picture thing that's coming be able to drive the things that you're looking to do as a business is huge. So, like, let's talk a little bit about what the installation process looks like. You talked about zero touch. This is one of the things technologically that I geek out about because I think it's just remarkable what you guys have been able to do and it's really really cool because again I've been around from when you guys were sending out, know Apple TVs and then they turned into you know Roku sticks and then it you know minute I've been around for a while with y'all and and I love the fact that you guys have made it so simple for the operators and Really you guys have taken a lot of the management a lot of what I think that a lot of people thought were pain and suffering of Having to figure out how to manage these things and I've taken a lot of that and put it into your guys's wheelhouse.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah, Have to walk through that. mean, a of times when I'm talking to folks in the industry about installation, they're like, right, so you got to roll a truck, right? No, we do not have to roll a truck. You contact Atmosphere. We'll have a ⁓ Atmosphere custom device to you within two days. And the beauty it is, is you unbox it. We've all plugged in streaming device before, so we have a custom Android streaming device that we run. You plug it into the wall. You plug it into the HDMI port. You connect it to your Wi-Fi. it does the rest. Self setup. It's already to your location and ⁓ to know you are and what you are. You choose your channel, choose your programming options, ⁓ and it's and running. We will monitor hours of operation via Google. So seeing if you're open or closed, we'll turn TV on and off for you. You can go into our custom scheduler and add all sorts of incredible events. We have a live sporting event. You can opt into us turning it on for you. So if you want to watch the Dallas Stars, for instance. ⁓ Feel our partner victory plus opt you into that if you're watching child TV will change the channel from child TV You can watch the stars game and then we'll turn it off and we'll do all of it for you The whole thing here is to make sure that you don't have to worry about it. So you plug it in and that's it No truck involved. No crazy installation needed. You just plugged the device in

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, which is the part that just is amazing to me. And again, you guys are monitoring to make sure that it's up and if it's down, you know, making phone calls or just letting them know, hey, you know, did you have a problem? What's going on? And the fact that you guys are so proactive about it. One of the other things that I hear from operators when they think about digital signage is how do I control what's on these devices so that I'm not advertising for my competitors or I don't have things going on? And, you know, years ago, ⁓ many years ago, had lots of gray hairs here. know, closed circuit TVs and having to make sure that, you know, Butterweiser wasn't advertising in a place that, you know, only sold Miller Lite or we're in Texas, both of us are in Texas. You know, got to make sure the Shinerbach is on draft and that everybody knows that it's the beer of choice here in Texas or whatever else. But I'd love to understand how do you guys protect against that to make sure that you're not, you know, at odds with your ultimate customer in the end.

Blake Sabatinelli: Yeah. Great question. It's pretty simple. If you're a bar or a restaurant operator, we have competitive blocks in place for other bars and restaurants. We want to make sure people are going to your location and not someone else's location. And if something slips through, we make sure we rectify it and fix it quickly because the nature of advertising is weird and crazy. Sometimes that happens, but we just, you just call our customer service folks. They're available here or send us an email.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: ⁓ and our ad operations team will knock it out instantly. So our whole goal is to make sure that you're driving results for your business and that, you know, any advertising that runs there is good and constructive for your environment. That's one thing I can say confidently that you can't, ⁓ that you can't deal with on, on, pay TV. You can't stop your competitor from airing there. You can't stop something that you don't want to run there for running. You just have to take the feeds. So we're here to help. We're here to be, you know, We're here to service our business operating partners and we do everything we can to make sure that we're not showing competitive ads or anything like

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, I love that idea. I've been in places where I'm like, dude, that's a direct competitor and their commercials running inside of your restaurant or inside your bar. And I think it's just, one of those things that people don't think about, but driving people to another spot is bad for business at the end of the day. And I love that you guys are so customer centric. Last kind of line of questioning wrapped around what the customer experience is like is how hard or easy is it to get your own advertisements up and And for those people that are like, I don't know how to do any of this stuff. guess walk our listeners through back to the value of it. We already talked about kind of the value, but for those people that are like, dude, I just run restaurants. I know how to make a mean margarita. I know how to make fajitas like the best of them, but I don't want to be dealing with that. guess help our listeners understand how you guys can help them to drive the behavior that they're looking for.

Blake Sabatinelli: Absolutely. So we've tried to address this pretty easily. comfortable going to a website at this point. we create you, there's a custom dashboard that you'll log into. There, a digital signage tool that you can use. And we've pre-created a ton of templates for you to log in and use. So you select a template, you input what your special is, and you literally hit start. ⁓ Much everything else in our business, we try to make it as simple as possible ⁓ because 100 % right. Most folks don't have time to worry about anything else or they don't care to or they're not good at it. And so we try to take all the pain that exists away there and make it as easy and simple as possible. That way you can focus on doing what you do, making great margaritas or great fajitas. And we can focus on the entertainment.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm. Love that. we're 26 minutes into recording and we've not talked about AI. Blake, which I'm teasing and we both get a chuckle out of it because we're on the tech space. But we know that AI has made an impact. And I guess I'd love to get your thoughts on how AI is going to impact advertising. It's going to impact kind of even your guys' business. Cause I could see people out there saying, dude, I'm just going to get a YouTube video. I'm going to go create a bunch of cat videos and go post them or do my own thing. versus kind of where you guys are at. I know the answer to this, but I'd love to have our listeners here that says, no, partnering with us doesn't cost you a whole lot of money. And really at the end of the day, it's driving a lot ⁓ of good behavior within your stores. But you keep hearing people saying, AI is gonna take it over and we're not gonna need software anymore. We're gonna create it all ourselves. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that to share with our listeners.

Blake Sabatinelli: For sure. So I think we talked a little over a month ago, the first time. My answer today will likely be different than it was four weeks ago, five weeks ago. Things have continually ⁓ evolved very, very quickly. Look, AI in the advertising space is going to mean two things. A, it's going to be ⁓ more agentic. So computer to computer connections, making decisions about where advertising should be run, ⁓ it should be run, validation of advertising, all the fun stuff that goes along with that. It's also going to mean significantly more personalization and targeting capability. ⁓ as more more data is trickled into these systems greater and greater targeting parameters ⁓ come play. So that'll an interesting ⁓ thing to shake out. What's, know, if you're looking at the advertising ⁓ industry broadly, be interesting to see how ⁓ agentic workflows up disrupting currently ⁓ people led If it ends up being ⁓ human in loop or human out of the loop, ⁓ I don't know how that's going to shape up.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: But what you are seeing is folks like Google and Meta and others spending tremendous amounts of money and seeing tremendous amounts of revenue growth as a result of these kind of agentic solutions. So that's on the advertising side. the how it impacts our business, it's only making our business smarter and better. ⁓ it smarter and better how can. ⁓ monitor video feeds, how we can ensure advertising is happening properly, how we can ensure that we're following your hours of operation and ⁓ all the needs that you needed within your business, because that's what's most critical to you, the operator. The disruptive element of I'm just going to go build it myself. I love competition. ⁓ It's very, very hard to build a hardware network. Just ask my gray beard how.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Yeah, good luck, right?

Blake Sabatinelli: It's-

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: My favorite is those restaurants that have built their own digital menu boards. I'm like, dude, you can tell that that was built by some kid that had a science experiment, science project at his local college or local high school. And he throws it up. And obviously, it's not where you need it to be.

Blake Sabatinelli: So reason going to be better no matter what. So if you talk about what AI can do, what AI can't do is what the people that sit in my content production department do.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Mm-hmm.

Blake Sabatinelli: AI is not an artist. not tapping their friends on the shoulder and saying, ⁓ my goodness, you gotta look at this, this is so funny. They're not doing that. The human element of production and of content creation is a critical part of our business. That's why we're an entertainment company. It's why we focus so heavily on that. And AI can't replicate that. Sure, you can replicate some of the elements of our business, but you can't replicate the amazing people that work here. So there's a yes and that comes with it.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I love that. And thanks for sharing. How do people get in touch? How do people learn more? You said it earlier, but I'd rather wrap up with just how do they get in touch? What can they expect the experience to look like? I you should go to the website and ⁓ up. Why don't you walk our listeners through that.

Blake Sabatinelli: Hey, go to ⁓ atmosphere.tv. can sign up right on the spot there. So super simple. You can either do self sign up. So once you do that, you sign up and we'll literally mail you the box or you can give us a call or phone numbers on the website or you can submit a request to have someone call you and walk you through the process. No matter which way you want it done, you don't want to talk to someone. You kind of want to talk to someone or you really want to talk to someone. We have a way for you to get in touch with us. So just go to atmosphere.tv. You can see right there on the homepage, says sign up it'll walk you through the whole process. It's incredibly straightforward. And we'd to hear from you.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I love that. And just for those that are like, got eight TVs. Do I have to have all eight TVs on Atmosphere? Can I do one or two? And again, I know the answer, but for those people that want to dabble with it and try it on one or two TVs, see how it works. And then, I guess, walk before they run. Is that something that you guys see people doing?

Blake Sabatinelli: Absolutely. vast majority. So we actually sit alongside a lot of people's pay TV ⁓ installations. So in single TV venues, like if you consider something like point of care, we tend to be a pay TV replacement. But in a bar or restaurant where there's a large number of TVs, we sit alongside the pay TV solution that's offered there. And so if you want to have us on one TV or two TVs. That's fine. We're usually on about a quarter of the TVs in any given location. So that's how you want to work with us, give us one, you know, give one ⁓ a shot and we can move on from there.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Awesome. Well Blake, again, I said it on the onset and so if anybody's catching this towards the latter part, thank you for coming back on. I think ⁓ it was fun to learn about where you guys are going and all that you guys continue to build because ⁓ I'm still impressed and I get blown away not only as a consumer but just watching your guys' business grow over last number of years, it's been fun be a ⁓ of what you guys have done. So great job doing that and thanks for coming on again a second time to record the similar content to what we did the first time.

Blake Sabatinelli: for having me glad to do a second time. ⁓

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: Awesome and to our listeners guys like I said at the onset you guys got lots of choices if you haven't already subscribed Please do so and make it a great day