October 03, 2007
Balderton Takes Stake In Top Up TV
Top Up TV has raised an undisclosed amount of VC funding from Balderton Capital. Top Up TV sells additional channels and services to Freeview customers on top of the 30 Freeview channels. The company was founded in 2003, and is led by Nick Markham, CEO, who came from ITV.
But it has been a turbulent ride. The company was founded by two former BSkyB executives, David Chance and Ian West. It was also 20% owned by Five which took a stake in 2005. Then it gets a bit murky. We understand the owner of Access Industries Len Blavatnik purchased a 70% stake in January 2007. Then Top Up TV restructured which saw the original company washed out and the founders are no longer part of management.
The cost of Top Up TV is£99.99 for the box plus £9.99 a month.
View - site
Posted at 03:25 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 25, 2006
Glowria Executes On VOD In Europe
French startup Glow Entertainment, the company behind the Glowria brand, has quietly been establishing a foothold in the European video-on-demand market. On the back of early deals in its home market, it is now crossing borders.
Glowria Easy On The Eyes And Easy On Users
Back in early 2005, we met Mihai Crasneau, founder and CEO of Glowria via our trusted industry insider Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz who was helping to raise capital for Glowria at the time. The two talked at length about Glowria's plans to deliver VOD in Europe.
It was a bit surprising to us at the time, considering the firm was established as a DVD rental play and VOD had fallen way, way out of favour. But we listened and filed it in our aging but reliable grey-matter-database.
MIhai Crasneau ModestlyBudding European VOD Business
That file was flagged "executing" the other day as we learned (via vpod.tv's coverage of the ETRE conference last week), that sure enough Glowria's CEO was doing what he said he would. We like to see execution, so here's a summary of what Crasneau has achieved.
- The online DVD rental business is still Glowria's core business, but it also has completed several acquisitions of smaller players in Germany and France
- It claims to be the Number 1 DVD rental provider in France and Number 2 in Germany.
- It's reaching breakeven in its home market (according to Crasneau).
- Acquired distribution deals with major Hollywood and 100 local content firms for several Euro markets. Users can buy or rent full length movies.
- Offers video on demand services as a white label service to Neuf-Cegetel's broadband customers and FNAC, the large retail chain and ecommerce vendor in France.
-Glowria has 80 employees and has done it all with a mere €12.5M in venture capital from French VCs.
The founder said he leveraged the DVD relationships with studios to create the VOD service. The next step is
Germany. Crasneau expects by 2008 to generate more than 70 percent of revenue from VOD.
VOD is one of those highly anticipated markets that has been "emerging" for more than ten years. So it feels kind of strange to actually see it happening and in such a low-key way. We first wrote about VOD in the mid-nineties, a time when players needed to buy bedroom-sized video servers, expensively acquire the content, get it into the right format for storage and delivery, develop software to manage the whole thing, and even if they had the cash and resources for all that, they faced the dilemna of the missing broadband pipes to deliver the hard-won digitized streams.
We asked a couple of our trusted VC experts about the "space", as they call it. From Paris to Munich, the sentiment is bullish and they all have different opinions on where the real money will be made. So with all that in mind, we'll be keeping our baby blues peeled for more signs of life in the VOD market in Europe.
Link- Mihai Etre Video
Posted at 07:58 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 19, 2006
Buzz Buildup For Neuf Cegetel IPO
Yesterday Les Echos reported the IPO slated for next week of Neuf Cegetel, the French alternative telco and broadband operator, is meeting demand.
Telcos and ISPs traditionally do well on Europe's public markets. Its rival, Iliad, had a stellar IPO back in 2004 that woke us all up after three years of post-bubble gloom and doom. We hear that the early investors in Iliad returned about 75 times money on that exit.
Neuf Cegetel is a good-sized float: if our math is right, a mid-bookbuilding price means the company would raise about €800M, circa €200M of which will actually flow to its coffers as new money. The rest buys out old investors. It would suggest a valuation of €4B.
We don't know much about how customers feel about Neuf Cegetel but we think it is pretty innovative compared to rivals.
It has shown that IPTV is not just about delivering the same stuff we get over the cable or terrestrial networks on a broadband pipe. For example, it launched a VOD service (provided by French startup Glowria) in a simple format.
Through a subsidiary it offers free phone calls in a Skype-like service called Wengo, and its "Hitview" audience monitoring service shows promise too.
Hitview enables IPTV subscribers to "see" not only what channels everyone else is watching, but also which shows are more the most popular. It says it's real time but we notice a 12 hour delay in the data online this morning. Realtime or not, it is difficult to this kind of thing with ease on cable and over-the-air broadcasting networks.
Neuf Does Things With IPTV That Satellite and Cable TV Operators Just Can't
Read - Wengo Expects Breakeven (a:c euro)
Read - Vodafone affiliate Neuf Cegetel IPO two-times oversubscribed - report (afx news)
Posted at 07:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 21, 2006
Vendor-Neutral Broadband Management Gets Cash To Expand
Nordic venture capital firm, Eqvitec has invested $6M (SEK 44 million) in Netadmin, a Swedish developer of broadband networking management software. The new capital in what looks like a first round is meant to finance the Linkopig-based startup's international expansion.
Founded in 2004, Netadmin is commercializing software originally developed in-house by Wasadata System AB, a Swedish ISP. It claims some 40 installations at operators and city networks running in Sweden and Denmark, with GothNet and TeliaSonera being some of its early customers.
The company's new backer said Netadmin's advantage over competing appolications is that it is equipment-vendor-neutral. It claims compatibility with Cisco, HP, D-Link, AlliedTelesyn, Nortel, and Alcatel gear.
It enables operators to manage, supervise, handle billing data, and make changes to the network, but also to configure components down to the end-user's gear, typically set-top boxes and home gateways.
Read - EQVITEC PARTNERS: Eqvitec Technology Fund III invests SEK 44 million in Netadmin
(press release)
Posted at 07:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 08, 2006
Pipex Rolls Up Broadband Operators - Stock Market Ingores It
Light Reading reports on the rapid expansion of Pipex in the UK to compete with incumbent BT. It's the same operator that recently formed a joint venture with Intel Capital to form a new Wimax service in certain cities in England.
It's worth a read, not least because it gives an indication of the valuations for upstart broadband resellers - the number of subscribers and price paid are itemized. The report says that despite it growth play, the stock market has not reacted either positively or negatively, which is curious.
Read - Pipex Beefs Up With Buys (light reading)
Posted at 08:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 04, 2006
TVBLOB: An Italian Take On User Generated TV and Video Chat
This summer the alarm:clock euro interviewed Fabrizio Caffarelli, CEO and founder of TVBLOB, an Italian startup that has a new twist on the idea of user generated TV. His company is offering a video call service that utilizes any televison and a souped up set-top box to enable two-way video communications. It is currently recruiting Italian consumers to trial the service.
Anyone that has hunched around a webcam on their PC to call distant family members on MSN Messenger or Skype will like this idea. Personal videoconferencing on the PC has improved lately, but video quality still isn't great.
TVBLOB says it over comes the technical issues of video over IP and makes it possible to make the video calls in places people normally gather like the living room. “In fact, we’re offering people a new way to communicate with family, friends or anyone else, only it’s through televisions instead of computers," said Caffarelli.
TVBLOB is headed up by Caffarelli, 61, who made his fortune in the nineties. He founded Easy CD, a company that develped and sold CD-ROM mastering solutions for the consumer market, moved the engineering team early on from Italy to the US, and after several years of quick growth, he sold it to Adaptec.
Post trade-sale, the Italian entrepreneur tried the villa-and-olive-grove life in Tuscany, but was lured back to technology venturing when he came up with the idea for this company about 7 years ago.
So far the startup has been targeting niche video applications: broadcasting, corporate videoconferencing, and security surveillance operators, as well as licensing the firm's middleware to Japanese suppliers reference designs and set-top box manufacturers.
Caffarelli has invested about €4M of his own money in research and product development. He says TVBLOB’s box does the same kinds of things that boxes from Sling or Tivo do, plus it has server functionality, and most importantly, it handles the vagaries of video over IP networks.
"If you think that enabling broadcast quality video over IP networks is insignificant, know this: in a demo we recently presented in Taiwan, exchanging live video between Milan and Taipei, the signal passed through 25 different Internet service provider networks," said Caffarelli.
The quality of the video and the streaming technology is so good, apparently, that television broadcasters, such as Italy's RAI and CNBC, use it for local studios.
But now it's time to go from niche to a consumer market. The founder is betting that some of the new fiber network operators, such as utility companies in Denmark and The Netherlands, are going to take up his offer to co-market the service along with the hardware.
"The fiber operators need to find something compelling to offer potential customers. Right now, their subscribers are asked to pay a higher price for very high speed Internet, but most people don’t need this level of bandwidth to surf the Internet or download email, consequently, they don’t upgrade,” pointed out Caffarelli, who added:
“There is very little in terms of services that truly take advantage of the power of fiber and our video communication solution, TV-to-TV, is the first to do this.”
Indeed, the system works best with fiber to the home, or the fastest of DSL services, however, Caffarelli conceded that it could work over a 512K link, but it is a stretch.
Currently, talks are underway with Italy’s Fastweb about co-marketing the TVBLOB boxes to its 2 million fiber-to-the-home subscribers. Caffarelli also said that he is working on “a few more channels to market”, including retailers and ISPs that will offer service and hardware bundles.
We think that if the trials prove successful, this could end up being popular with fiber broadband operators, both incumbent and alternative operators. Video bloggers might also be early adopters.
But strategic partnerships with the likes of Logitech and Creative Labs would be good too, to make sure that there is a wider range of peripherals to go with the system, such as cameras, all-in-one remote controls, and microphones, ones that don't look to geeky in the living room or home.
Posted at 06:51 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 18, 2006
German Telcos In Demand, As Acquisition Targets
Is the German broadband services market going to get more competitve or less competitive? More competition would be good for online service and media companies whose businesses rely on lots of users having big fat data pipes, as prices would drop and adoption would increase.
We are wondering about it because the German press is reporting that private equity giant, Apax, and the UK-based telecommunications giant, are both looking to buy German telcos. AOL's AOL Deutschland business is up for sale, but there are others that they are eyeing too.
BT says it would consider businesses doing €100M and up to €250M in sales, while Apax has a wider price span.
Apax's plan is to do a rollup, while BT's is aiming to find new revenue streams.
The Apax strategy seems kind of counterintuitive from where we sit as it would lead to less competition in the telecoms market, rather than more.
Read - Das große Fressen (manager magazin)
Read - VDSL: BT Group rechnet mit ungehindertem Zugang (pcwelt)
Posted at 06:21 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 01, 2006
We May Be Acquired, Or Not, says Mike Ing PacketExchange COO
“… or we may be doing some acquiring ourselves. At this point, there is nothing on the roadmap,” said Mike Ing COO of the high-speed Internet provider PacketExchange in response to a question about M&A plans from a LightReading TV senior analyst.
Ing said that acquisitions, in either direction, are not part of the plan at the moment, rather it's "growth" that is the focus.
PacketExchange has built an Ethernet-based peering network, that enables it to offer a kind of express lane within the public Internet, for the likes of online gambling providers and gaming hosters, as well as big name customers, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
We have been following PacketExchange for several years now and hear from one of its backers that it’s now doing about $12M a year in sales.
Posted at 06:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 10, 2006
VCs Go Large On CoreOptics Latest Round
Optical networking hardware maker, CoreOptics Inc., has raised $28M from new and existing investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $68M since being founded in Nuremberg Germany in January 2001. That is a pretty large sized round of VC for a Europe optical component manufacturer. It must be hitting its milestones on target and on time.
Its backers include GIMV, Quest for Growth, Crescendo Ventures, TVM Capital, High Tech Private Equity, Atila Ventures and others.
Coreoptics' chips and subsystems are found inside optical networking gear for 10Gig and 40Gig connections.
Posted at 05:47 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 09, 2006
Zattoo= P2P + European TV + DRM
Looks like P2P streaming is attracting entrepreneurs and European broadcasters. We've been writing about Octoshape and now there's another entrant to mention, Zattoo.
The startup says it aims to deliver TV on the Web with the same quality as broadcast television, going for full DRM, authorized, and localized version of the service.
Based in San Francisco, with development in Ann Arbor and Zurich, Zattoo was co-founded by CEO Beat Knecht, a Swiss techie with management experience at UBS, McKinsey. Prior to founding Zattoo, he had been heading up marketing at Levanta (formerly Linuxcare) in San Francisco. Co-founder is CTO Sugih Jamin, an associate professor at Uni Chicago.
Zattoo debuts this week in Switzerland, broadcasting World Cup soccer matches for the national Swiss TV org Schweizer Fernsehen (SFI, 2 and TSR). It will be adding broadcasts from German, French, and Italian networks, as well as a smattering of news networks (Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, CNN etc)
We have an open question on the service - how does Zattoo know the location of the viewer? Is it based on the IP address or a virtual location based on email addresses? It must have some mechanism in place to restrict viewer access so that only those allowed to watch, based on the rights assigned the broadcaster, are given access.
Posted at 07:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 22, 2006
vpod.tv Takes On Cash For Online Video Biz
vpod.tv, a startup based in Paris that hosts and publishes videos has a €5M commitment from Innovacom, which does VC investments for France Telecom and mobile network operator, Orange. We'll be updating this post after our scheduled interview with the founders later today. In the meantime Om Malik has some thoughts on the startup.
Read - Fellow Blogger, Broadband Fanatic (om malik)
Posted at 05:29 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 18, 2006
TeliaSonera Buys Broadband Rival - VCs Exit
Several press sources are reporting that TeliaSonera AB has acquired NextGenTel, the second largest broadband provider in the Norwegian market. Much of the shares acquired were bought from VC-backers Northzone Ventures, which had seed funded the company in the pre-revenue phase back in 2000, Geocapital, and the other major shareholders.
The price paid values the company at NOK 1.9B (€243M)
According to TotalTelecom, among the sellers are also members of NextGenTel's management team, including Chief Executive Officer Olav Stokke and Chief Financial Officer Odd Bjoern Ur. The team will, however, remain with the company. No management changes are planned.
Nextgentel's stock was listed on the Oslo Exchange in December 2003, one of the few tech stock IPOs that year.
Read - Teliasonera has increased shareholding in nextgentel to 90.5 percent
