Harris Broadcast announced this morning that it had completed its purchase of Imagine Communications.
The deal brought Imagine’s adaptive bit rate (ABR) technology into Harris’ product portfolio. When the acquisition was first announced in December, Harris Broadcast CEO Charlie Vogt said cable and IPTV represented a $300 million market opportunity for Harris. Financial terms of the deal weren’t released.
“TV Everywhere is the future of our industry, and our customers are vigorously pursuing this path to expand their business models and improve the monetization of content across any screen,” Vogt said. “The advanced adaptive bit rate technology created by Imagine combines quality, density and a small footprint to greatly leapfrog anything else on the market today and improves transcoding economics up to a factor of 10 over competing alternatives.
“Our content creator and content distribution customers, including cable, MSO and telecommunications service providers, will benefit significantly from end-to-end portfolio integration that establishes a clear pathway to linear and non-linear viewing parity across every screen.”
Buying Imagine Communications beefed up Harris Broadcast’s end-to-end solutions portfolio, particularly enhancing its OTT, mobile video and multi-screen TV Everywhere capabilities, while furthering interoperability of technology and systems from both the linear and non-linear TV viewing worlds.
It also brings advanced transcoding technology utilizing cutting edge software breakthroughs that run in high density, low power commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and blade-server environments, consistent with Harris Broadcast’s strategy of software-centric, virtualized operations.
“In addition to fully supporting the existing Imagine ICE Broadcast System customers and penetrating this attractive global market opportunity, we will leverage the quality and innovation in both companies to build next generation solutions around ABR, cloud PVR and Content Delivery Networks,” said Harris chief technology officer Steve Reynolds. “Our combined portfolio today offers the most robust compression and processing solution in the industry. Imagine’s advancements and transcoding expertise in high availability, IP-centric, Linux-based environments complements existing advancements underway at Harris Broadcast and opens the door to an array of development and integration opportunities.”
In November, Reynolds left his job at Comcast to join Denver-based Harris Broadcast.