Streamticker 2007: The Year in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Fundings
Echostar, the company behind consumer satellite entertainment network Dish, acquired Sling Media, Inc. for $380 million late in the year. Sling Media’s SlingBox device has been used by many consumers to watch their home television shows or movies while on the road.
Sling, which launched a content play last year dubbed Sling Entertainment Group, is in the process of delivering its Clip+Sling product to allow clip sharing between devices. The National Hockey League rapidly embraced the Clip+Sling concept, but other sports empires, such as Major League Baseball, strenuously objected. Watch in the new year to see how this plays out under EchoStar’s management, which already has content contracts in place.
Sling’s technology (including new technology designed to work within a home that builds on top of older products limited to outside viewing) will be integrated into EchoStar’s set-top boxes, but it may take some time to reach critical mass. EchoStar considers that point to be when one of its boxes has penetrated 1 million households.
EchoStar has petitioned the Internal Revenue Service to allow it to split its assets (including the new Sling products) into separate technology and infrastructure assets. To do this, the company proposes to spin off all technology assets as a company that would be separate from Dish, including set-top boxes dedicated to the Dish network and the Sling products.
Media Workflows
Companies involved in media workflows, from video file servers for newsrooms to transcoding platforms, also made acquisition news in 2007. Most notably, Anystream, which has focused on video production and delivery workflows with a side canter into elearning systems, acquired Cauldron Solutions in an attempt to "expand its business beyond video production to reach operations and business management" using Anystream Agility for multiplatform publishing, combined with Cauldron’s business intelligence platform. The company sees its push beyond the production puzzle to solve media management problems with "custom dashboards, centralized scheduling, management, distribution and reporting" to comply with contract terms and agreements. The product was renamed Velocity, approaching a market that broadcast master control systems makers have also delved into.
Content Delivery Networks
Several CDNs also made news in 2007. Akamai, one of the granddaddies of the CDN space, acquired several companies, including Red Swoosh, Inc. The acquisition, which was an all-stock merger transaction, valued Red Swoosh at approximately $15 million. The golden apple in this deal was Red Swoosh’s "client-side technology for supporting the management and distribution of media files in a controlled fashion, respecting the rights restrictions and copyrights of all publishers." Akamai saw the acquisition as a way to accelerate its play in the accelerated internet delivery space, with client-side file management that meshed nicely with Akamai’s scalability on the back end. Akamai’s existing engineering team in California absorbed the Red Swoosh engineering team.
Content Aggregation
Content aggregators also got into the merger game as podcasters and video bloggers created enough content to push the need for aggregation companies to consolidate for key economies of scale.
Video ASP Origin Digital acquired InterData Software to enhance its content management and reporting. Original Digital retained "key members of the IDS management and engineering team" and used some of the technologies from the acquisition to bring its Second Life video advertising engine to life for big-name brands that wanted to guarantee quality delivery and consistent reporting of advertising runs. Origin Digital’s Odaptor solution, which the company rolled out this year, enables content creators, distributors, and operators to launch web video programming quickly and efficiently across various sites, delivery methods, and geographies.
In March, Wizzard Software announced it had acquired the podcasting company Webmayhem, Inc., which was doing business as Liberated Syndication. As the acquisition finalized, Wizzard announced it was launching a new media division to monetize podcasting content with a blend of speech technologies, which aid in automated advertisement selection, and geographical targeting capabilities.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, a London-based company was acquired by RawFlow, which markets peer-to-peer streaming content delivery technologies. RawFlow acquired Aggregator TV, which had been funded by Intel, 3i, and Amadeus, to integrate Aggregator’s end-to-end video distribution platforms.
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