Flowplayer and Lemonwhale, two European online video player providers, are merging their operations with an eye towards unifying their platforms to drive audience engagement and revenues.
Flowplayer is a privately held company in Finland specializing in online video players, and Lemonwhale is a Sweden-based company specializing in video platforms.
Financial terms of the merger agreement were not disclosed. PwC served as the lead adviser on the deal.
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Upon completion of the merger, the new company will continue to be privately held, and will operate under the Flowplayer brand.
Emanuel Viklund, Lemonwhale’s current CEO, will become the CEO of the combined company. Anssi Piirainen, CEO of Flowplayer, will join the management team and drive the transition to a single company.
Viklund told FierceOnlineVideo that since Flowplayer only trails You Tube and Vimeo in the video play race, the merger will enhance the scale of both companies as a combined entity.
“Flowplayer is the third largest video player on the web you can customize yourself,” Viklund said. “After You Tube and Vimeo, Flowplayer is the third most deployed video player in terms of the number of sites that are using the platform.”
But scale is only one part of the equation that the newly combined company will bring to its online video customers.
The other element is a focus on ensuring quality for their customers and users.
“What was also interesting is the focus Flowplayer had for some time on playback experience and playback performance in the individual player,” Viklund said. “They had a vision that was a bit contrary to where other video player frameworks are going by building large proprietary black boxes around the player.”
The new company will continue to serve four segments: enterprises like Mercedes-Benz, NASA and IBM; content owners including Disney and Universal; publishers including Bonnier, Schibsted and La Nación; and broadcasters including Discovery and Yle.
“These customers appreciate performance, load times and speed,” Viklund said. “We’re moving to a platform with more functionality and I think it’s a great complement with an adaptive player with good capabilities on the service side or for managing the video.”
Viklund added we’ll look at “opportunities to bring some more value to those loyal Flowplayer customers in terms of the Lemonwhale solutions.”