Amdocs drops $224 million on Vubiquity for an extra shot of VOD

Communications software vendor Amdocs has made a strategic move into the video-on-demand market with the acquisition of Vubiquity for $224 million.

Vubiquity has specialized in providing video-on-demand infrastructure and operations for some time, and seems to be well positioned as telcos increasingly look to the multiplay model to add value to their subscribers. Amdocs will have noticed that many of its customers want to get better a video and general content services, so this acquisition will give it a significant string to its bow in that respect.

“This acquisition uniquely positions Amdocs at the centre of increased convergence across the content community and video distributors including major OTT providers,” said Eli Gelman, Amdocs CEO. “Our joint offerings address the media and entertainment industry’s challenge in balancing the incredible growth of content and the many ways to consume content with making programming easier, faster to deliver and ultimately watch, while also delivering profits.”

“Vubiquity has successfully been connecting content owners and distributors across many diverse platforms and evolving business models at the core of its support to the media community,” said Vubiquity CEO Darcy Antonellis.

“Our capabilities, coupled with Amdocs’ global scale and rich set of complementary solutions around monetisation, analytics and personalised customer experience will be truly unique, allowing us to deliver to a larger set of customers while solving key industry challenges. This includes helping video distributors deliver additional profitable offerings, as well as enabling content owners to focus on content creation and maximising licensing revenues.”

Antonellis will stay on as head of Amdocs Media Division and has a formidable reputation within that industry so, as long as Amdocs can conclude the tricky business of integrating a successful entrepreneur into a larger corporate structure they should have a good asset. Having said that $224 million is not a lot for money for a leading VOD player, which indicates that sector might not be the cash cow man y operators are hoping it will be.