Elemental Technologies, a software developer that enables media and entertainment companies to format their video content for over-the-top distribution, has been acquired by Amazon Web Services for an undisclosed amount.
Terms of the deal were not released, although The Information said the Portland, Ore.-based provider was purchased for $500 million in an all-cash transaction. A spokesperson for Elemental Technologies told FierceOnlineVideo that the company will retain its brand and product lines after the acquisition closes.
Elemental works with a number of high-profile media companies to help them manage live and on-demand video streaming of content that they also broadcast or distribute through pay-TV providers. In January, for example, Elemental teamed with Pac-12 Networks to handle video processing of its TV Everywhere and YouTube streams of the inaugural College Football Championship.
The provider said it has over 700 media franchise customers worldwide and helps power multiscreen apps including BBC iPlayer, CNNGo, ESPN, HBO Go, Sky Go and Sky Now.
For Amazon Web Services, the acquisition of Elemental is a way to make its cloud-based offerings more attractive to media and entertainment providers, combining Elemental's solutions with its scalable services.
"Elemental's deep media processing expertise at [the] high end of the market combined with AWS cloud will allow customers to focus the majority of their time on innovations," said Kalyanaraman Prasad, VP Edge Services at AWS, on a conference call with media following the announcement. "Our highly complementary solutions eliminate the cost and complexity that media companies have had to deal with in the past and leave the heavy lifting of the underlying technology structure to AWS."
Elemental, for its part, sees the acquisition as a way to realize its "core purpose" of perfecting the media experience, said Sam Blackman, co-founder and CEO, on the conference call. "...fundamentally, Elemental's ability to achieve its long term vision for software defined video was constrained by its inability to innovate across the entire video pipeline on an end-to-end basis," he said. "AWS-Elemental can eliminate this barrier by a combination of the best video processing and the best cloud based infrastructure resources including storage, compute, global CDN and many application level services available on a global scale."
AWS and Elemental have collaborated on cloud-enabled video processing for the past four years, he said.
"The media and entertainment industry is at a unique inflection point, and as a part of Amazon, we will be in an even stronger position to help our customers delight their viewers globally," Blackman said in the release. "We're thrilled to have Amazon supporting our growth and ongoing commitment to our customers' success."
For more:
- see the release
- The Information has this article (sub. req.)
Related articles:
Elemental partners with Pac-12 Networks to manage live streaming, YouTube distribution
Elemental shows off real-time 4K HEVC encoding
Imagine partners with Disney/ABC, Verizon and HP to fill in puzzle pieces of IP video ecosystem