The third quarter was a busy one for firms involved in online video in terms of financing and acquisitions as nearly $150 million in new funding for 14 companies was announced, and 10 companies changed hands.
The top three funding deals:
- Tudou ($50 million): Tudou Founder and CEO Gary Wang said the Series E funds will be used to invest aggressively into expanding its main advertising supported web platform, and developing mobile/portable device video technology as key future growth drivers. Tudou also plans to integrate professional content with its "Orange Box" made-for-Internet original programming debuting the first Tudou drama series in fall 2010, as well as a large UGC (user generated content) archive of over 38 million videos. Tudou is transforming its website model into a fully operated media house. The company has raised $135 million through five rounds. See this release for more detail on the funding. Last month, Wang said that the company would likely float an IPO "fairly soon," looking to expand bandwidth and grow its library of professional content;
- Online video platform Ooyala ($22 million): Ooyala CEO Jay Fulcher the company, which has raised some $42 million in three rounds of funding over the last three-and-a-half years, has earmarked the capital for building out global support capabilities, continuing to push what it sees as a major differentiator for Ooyala in its engineering work on analytics and monetization, and taking advantage of opportunities to play more of a consultative role with some of Ooyala's larger customers. See this story for more.
- Wireless networking company Quantenna ($21 million): The company said the series E funding will be used to help extend its global leadership position in 4x4 MIMO 802.11n Wi-Fi chipsets and accelerate product deployment through carriers and retail channels worldwide. See this release for more detail.
Will Richmond at VideoNuze says that without the $50 million that went to Todou, the Q3 total actually would have been the lowest since 2Q09. For a complete list of funding activity, see his report.
On the acquisition front, only two occurred in the start of the quarter: July saw HP Snapfish pick up Motionbox and Pace acquire 2Wire. August saw three deals, Limelight's purchase of Delve, Telestream's pick up of Anystream and Cisco's buy of ExtendMedia. Half of the deals were made in September, Metacafe bought Action Sports, KIT Digital acquired Accela Communication and a week later made a deal for Brickbox, VideoEgg acquired SixApart and AOL just last week made a deal for 5Min Media.
For more:
- see this VideoNuze report