This week, TiVo decided to acquire Digitalsmiths for $135M. Their search and discovery platform is used by 7 of the top 10 MVPDs in the US. A smart deal for both parties including the owners of Digitalsmiths that raised little more than $30 million in three rounds of funding.
“The Digitalsmiths acquisition opens new opportunities to commercialize and deploy TiVo’s cloud based services and technologies to operators, in an extremely cost effective way that can be offered either independently or in conjunction with TiVo’s renowned user interface,” said Tom Rogers, CEO and President of TiVo.
The acquisition is clever because TiVo is increasingly targets becoming a solution provider for pay-TV operators as already demonstrated in Europe with the Virgin Media and ComHem deals. Digitalsmiths’s solution is not only used by MVPDs but also Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Kindle and multiple set-top boxes.
The announcement comes at a time when other Internet TV companies set the stage for more disruption of the traditional TV marked where Tivo has historically operated successfully. At CES’s we witnessed another couple of examples of this with Roku announcing the integration with Hisense and TCL TV sets.Also, the announcement of Netflix becoming the first to deliver 4K content marks this change.
“The Digitalsmiths acquisition opens new opportunities to commercialize and deploy TiVo’s cloud based services and technologies to operators, in an extremely cost effective way that can be offered either independently or in conjunction with TiVo’s renowned user interface,” said Tom Rogers, CEO and President of TiVo.
The acquisition is clever because TiVo is increasingly targets becoming a solution provider for pay-TV operators as already demonstrated in Europe with the Virgin Media and ComHem deals. Digitalsmiths’s solution is not only used by MVPDs but also Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Kindle and multiple set-top boxes.
The announcement comes at a time when other Internet TV companies set the stage for more disruption of the traditional TV marked where Tivo has historically operated successfully. At CES’s we witnessed another couple of examples of this with Roku announcing the integration with Hisense and TCL TV sets.Also, the announcement of Netflix becoming the first to deliver 4K content marks this change.
