IBC 2016: Cobalt acquires ImmediaTV
Cobalt Digital has acquired ImmediaTV, a Silicon Valley company focused on IP-centric video-processing solutions in both openGear and standalone formats for broadcast, event, streaming, and IPTV applications. The two companies have worked together closely for several years, creating bundled solutions for mutual customers. By acquiring ImmediaTV’s products and video-compression expertise, Cobalt can accelerate the growth of its IP product line.
“ImmediaTV is a respected broadcast-industry brand and a well established openGear vendor with a large and happy customer base,” says Bob McAlpine, EVP, sales and marketing, Cobalt Digital. “Sharing our customers and using the same platform creates synergy that will help increase sales, grow revenue, and reduce costs. Not only that, but we have great admiration for ImmediaTV’s engineering talent, who are veterans in the broadcast and network-equipment industries. We’ll be able to develop compression products more quickly and with superior features and benefits in order to meet demand as the industry transitions to IP-based signal transport.”
Adds Cobalt Digital founder/President Gene Zimmerman, “This deal represents the first acquisition for Cobalt Digital, supporting our strategic position for growth and expansion. We couldn’t be happier to have the professionals at ImmediaTV joining Cobalt to assist.”
ImmediaTV designs and manufactures high-performance MPEG-4 AVC video-compression, digital-video–transport, and digital-video–processing equipment with a balanced blend of broadcast and internet features. It has a longstanding relationship with Cobalt, which resells its advanced MPEG encoder, decoder, transcoder, and gateway openGear products as a part of jointly designed, bundled solutions. As a result, Cobalt sales and technical staff are already familiar with ImmediaTV’s technology, and there is a strong rapport between the teams.
With this sale, the Cobalt sales and technical teams will become even more proficient in ImmediaTV’s MPEG products and solutions and will be better able to assess customer requirements in the field. Between a strong, knowledgeable staff and the addition of ImmediaTV’s U.S.-based R&D and manufacturing, Cobalt will be able to offer even better customer support and quicker development of the features and products customers need.
“After working together for several years creating superb solutions that fill an ever-growing need in the industry, the time was right to join forces,” says Bill Slattery, founder/CTO, ImmediaTV. “This deal means our customers will have immediate access to Cobalt’s diverse range of openGear products.”
The sale closed on Sept. 8. ImmediaTV’s staff will join Cobalt’s organization.