IP Democracy: Little JumpTV Gets Bigger With Sports Net Buy

Online TV channel company JumpTV announced a deal yesterday to buy a broadband sports channel run by tech company XOS Technologies. The price tag was $60.25 million.

Although not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, the news caught my eye for two reasons. First, JumpTV, which raised $100 million in venture capital earlier this year, is clearly looking to become a bigger player in the new world of Internet TV. Although JumpTV has created an impressive portal of 290 TV “channels,” for the most part those channels are little niche, and presumably little-viewed on an individual basis, “ethnic” channels consisting of content from various countries around the globe.

More interestingly, however, is the value of the deal. Florida-based XOS’s sports products aren’t high on anybody’s radar screens and consist mostly of “coaching solutions” that allow team coaches to improve players’ games through video playback and evaluation, although XOS does stream live sporting events — 14,000 such events are expected to be streamed over XOS’s platform in 2007. Canadian-based JumpTV has an international orientation and expects the games to appeal mostly to American expats overseas.

It’s hard to say if the $60.25 million price tag is a good deal or not for what XOS has built, but it’s a nice piece of change for a web-based TV-oriented service that isn’t a household name. I suspect that there are dozens, if not hundreds, or similar kinds of web-based TV services out there just ripe for acquisition.

Are we entering a high-activity deal-making phase for web-based video services and technologies that will ultimately result in a more mature, more stable and more profitable new video medium? JumpTV’s deal to buy XOS’s service for a nifty $60.25 million suggests that we are.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on July 18, 2007 10:43 AM to IP Democracy