Ericsson has submitted an offer for Tandberg TV at $1.4 billion that is 10 percent higher than the recent offer from Arris. Ericsson already owns 11.7 percent of Tandberg.
This offer shows that after a late start, Ericsson is getting more serious about TelcoTV. The addition of Tandberg to Ericsson would put it in the same league as Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens, and Cisco in terms of their IPTV capabilities. If this merger goes through it will likely stimulate more M&A activity. Harmonic is certainly a choice candidate. It is also likely to stimulate activity in the Middleware and Video On Demand area. Minerva, Orca, Bitband, and Kasenna are likely candidates in these areas.
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4 comments:
When you come to think about it, every telco vendor would eventually offer an end-to-end IPTV solution either via partnerships or via acquisitions.
The question is whether there are more niche players than large vendors. If you look the VOD segment, for instance, MOT ,CSCO and HLIT already bought a player in the field. That leaves people like SI,NT,ALU,Huawei in a problematic position. On the niche companies one can find CCBL,CCUR Kasenna, perhaps SEAC but they're too big and versatile a player to be regarded as niche player.
the same goes for video processing companies (Modulus,scop,obas etc...) , middleware etc.
wh o do u think is better positioned , the niche players or the large vendors?
TIA
There are still a lot of opportunities for acquisitions. There are still a lot of relatively smaller companies involved in IPTV, especially in Middleware and Content Protection/ Digital Rights Management. Some companies such as Huawei and UTStarcom have been building in house capability in most of the IPTV categories. Alcatel Lucent has been relying on partners and has built up sophisticated labs where they can test interoperability with various partners in Antwerp and Dallas.
Hey Bob
I was under the impression most of the M&A activity would be around the video processing segment. The Tandberg acquisition might lead to a huge domino effect imo. After TUTS and TAT are off the market, assuming TERN would also be bought by MOT, that leaves more than half a dozen video processing players like OBAS,SCOP,BBND,Modulus, RGB and HLIT.
Don't expect that the majority of them to survive 2007 as independent companies
The video headends are just one segment of the the IPTV food chain. There will be M&A activity in video on demand and middleware as well. The one are that has been immune so far is content protection/digital rights management. I think that will change this year.
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