Xumo and Local Now have added the Loupe linear channel, a visual art platform and marketplace, to their free ad-supported streaming services.
Loupe distributes a 24/7 4K linear channel, blending visual works from international artists with instrumental music, and distribution of the service, which exists in both app and linear FAST channel format, is growing fast.
The Xumo and Local Now agreements add to a deal announced last month to include Loupe on Samsung TV Plus in the U.S. Loupe’s linear channel is also featured on ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV, where it reached 500,000 users in its first 30 days on the AVOD platform last summer. Loupe also distributes itself in the form of an app, which is supported by Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV and Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex.
Loupe says it has a total audience of 4 million streamers worldwide, with 1.5 million monthly active users.
Local Now is Allen Media Group’s U.S. streaming service for local news and entertainment. Xumo, a division of Comcast Cable, offers over 200 digital channels of free programming across 12 genres, including sports, live events and lifestyle. The new carriage agreement with Xumo is an international distribution deal that will feature Loupe art on Channel 458, within the lifestyle genre. The international territories that will have access to Loupe will include the U.K., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Italy, France and Germany.
The art platform features themed series every hour, incorporating art delivered with music from the Loupe app. The themed series include Trending Art, Epic Landscapes and Black & White, which features black and white photography. New series will be introduced throughout the year as more art is added to the platform.
Platform founder and CEO Dot Bustelo, a former Apple product manager under Steve Jobs, launched Loupe as a streaming art app on Apple TV in 2015. Loupe eventually became Apple TV’s No. 1 lifestyle app in over 60 countries and saw users regularly tuning in for an average of two hours per session.
“After working at Apple for many years on product, I saw an opportunity in the market to build something transformative in streaming media that I was looking for myself,” Bustelo told Next TV. “As an Apple product executive, I visited top recording studios around the country introducing Apple’s music software to musicians like Trent Reznor and many more. In my studio, I’d run old movies without the sound while listening to and working on music. It puzzled me why I had to run old movies to have extraordinary visuals for music. What about the two billion people streaming music today? What are they doing with their TVs? And why don’t visual artists have the same opportunities for discovery? I thought about the technology of streaming music, and set out to apply similar technology to visual art.”
