AioTV, an IT company with a significant development team in Halifax, has closed its doors.

The company was founded by Halifax native Michael Earle, a serial entrepreneur who is now based in Denver. The company had operations in both Halifax and Denver. Earle did not respond to a request for a comment on the company last week, but a person familiar with the situation confirmed it has closed.

In a May 2016 interview, Earle said the company employed about 20 people in Halifax and that he hoped to increase the size of the operation through the year with the goal of doubling it.

People within the IT community in Halifax said several companies have expressed interest in hiring aioTV's personnel as there is high demand for development talent everywhere. 

AioTV began in 2011 with the goal of developing a platform that could deliver a range of video services – television, streaming services, YouTube, etc. – on a single platform. Earle received a $1 million funding from Innovacorp, and a year later sold 44 percent of the company to China’s UTStarcom Holdings Corp. for $8 million.

The company pivoted about three years ago to design a video curation system for Tier 1 telecomm companies. The aioTV curation function was a personalized recommendation engine that chose a broad array of material for the user from more than just a list of movies. For example, if you had just watched a movie, the curation function could inform you of material on YouTube about the making of the movie, or where to find interviews with the stars.

Earle said at the time that aioTV was in talks with four blue chip companies about taking the product. These included the second-largest cable operator in the world, as well as top-tier players in the U.S and Canada.

The news from the company since then had seemed positive, as it struck a partnership with publicly listed ARRIS International in late 2016 and announced a new patent approval in 2017. Yet regulatory filings by UTStar indicated there were problems. The Chinese company reported a $1.7 million “investment impairment”, or a decline in the asset value of an investment, in 2017, which followed a $4.3 million impairment in 2016.