TANDBERG Television has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SkyStream, a provider of IP video delivery solutions, for $80 million in cash and TANDBERG Television stock. The transaction is expected to close in April 2006.
Based in Sunnyvale, CA, SkyStream employs approximately 100 people across North America, as well as in the UK, China and Korea. The company, with more than 300 customers worldwide, posted 2005 revenues of $30.7M, up 43 percent from 2004, and with a gross margin of 65 percent. TANDBERG said more than 50 SkyStream engineers will be retained at their current locations.
Due to the acquisition TANDBERG Television will expand its technology offering for IPTV and also for the cable, satellite DTH and on-demand markets with complementary solutions from SkyStream. In addition, SkyStream’s presence in the telco regional headend business is a natural fit for TANDBERG’s central headend IPTV systems and global customer base.
SkyStream’s Mediaplex-20 and iPlex switched digital video headends for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC encoding and transcoding are used by IPTV operators in Asia, Europe and the United States. In addition, SkyStream’s zBand content delivery software for push on-demand services is complementary to the TANDBERG’s N2 on-demand solutions.
The two companies already share a number of common customers within the telco and satellite networks industry, where they enable operators to deliver advanced IPTV and HDTV services.
The SkyStream acquisition is TANDBERG Television’s third in the past 12 months, after having acquired N2 Broadband and GoldPocket Interactive in 2005.
For more information, visit www.tandbergtv.com/.
