Welcome to the latest installment of Dan Rayburn's Streaming Insights & Intelligence, a weekly insights column on StreamTV Insider where the industry analyst puts facts and figures to the news you need to know about. Join the discussion on LinkedIn and check back each week as he recaps key industry happenings.
For the week of November 27, 2024, Rayburn is tracking Akamai, Amazon Fire TV, WWE, MLB and more.
- Akamai has provided more details tied to their $125 million bid for customer contracts from Edgio's security and content delivery businesses as part of Edgio's bankruptcy auction. These contracts will give "several hundred net new customers" the necessary support to migrate smoothly to Akamai. For the fourth quarter of 2024, Akamai expects this transaction to add approximately $9-$11 million in revenue. For the full year 2025, Akamai anticipates this transaction will add approximately $80-$100 million in revenue and have approximately $25-$30 million of transition service costs. More details and discussion here.
Bending Spoons, a Milan-based mobile app development company, announced plans to acquire Brightcove in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $233 million. Brightcove shareholders will receive $4.45 per share in cash for each share of Brightcove common stock, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2025.
This deal is a natural progression for the company, and over the past 18 months, I spoke to multiple PE companies that were looking to take Brightcove private. It was only a matter of time before this happened.
While Brightcove has struggled to grow revenue over the past four years, it has a clean balance sheet and has projected a non-GAAP loss from operations of $0.1M — $1.1M for 2024. The company ended Q3 with $27M in cash and cash equivalents. Brightcove's 2024 revenue guidance is $197.7M - $198.7M, so Bending Spoons is valuing the company at about 1.2x projected 2024 revenue. Brightcove's 2023 revenue was $201.1M, 2022 revenue was $211.1M, and 2021 revenue was $211.09M. More details and discussion here.- New data shows that 4K bit delivery growth is still flat across CDNs. In 2022, I detailed how many streaming services were optimizing their encoding and, in some cases, reducing the highest rung in their bitrate ladder to save money. CDNs I spoke to then were very open about seeing a drastic reduction in the volume of video bits delivered due to bitrate optimization. More details here.
- On January 1, 2025, the WWE Network will shut down in Europe, with WWE Raw and WWE's content library moving to Netflix. The WWE Network will remain active in international markets where Netflix doesn’t have the rights to stream WWE programming.
Agora, a Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that laid off 14.15% of its workforce in Q1 of this year, disclosed during its Q3 earnings that it reduced its workforce again but did not provide a number.
In 2022, the company laid off 30% of its workforce and has cut its headcount by almost 50% in the past two years. In Q3, Agora's revenue was $31.6 million, a decrease of 9.8% YoY on a net loss of $24.2 million ($4.8 million of the loss was from severance expenses). Agora ended Q3 with $362.6 million in cash and cash equivalents. The company's stock is up 90% year-to-date, closing at $4.76 on November 25.
- MLB's commissioner, Rob Manfred, said the league aims to have a new national TV package ready by 2028 to sell a blackout-free package offered via MLB’s own streaming service or licensed to a streaming distributor. Six teams that have deals with Diamond Sports Group have their local media rights expiring in 2028. League-wide, 15-20 teams will have current rights contracts expiring that year.
- JioCinema has successfully merged with Walt Disney’s Hotstar platform, creating a new entity, JioStar. The new joint venture has introduced new subscription plans at Jiostar.com, offering SD and HD video options. The packages offer 22 pricing variations, depending on what consumers choose for content and video quality.
- Amazon said it has sold more than 250 million Fire TV devices globally since the platform’s launch in 2014. The company declined to break out how many devices are used daily, so we don't know how many are in the market since many would have been replaced over ten years. However, at CES 2022, Amazon reported 150 million Fire TV devices sold, and in March of 2023, 200 million had been sold to date. So, the numbers show that Amazon sold 50 million Fire TV devices in the past 19 months.
Dan Rayburn is an analyst in the streaming media industry, with regular TV appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Schwab Network amongst others. He is conference Chairman for the NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas each year, and his streamingmediablog.com website is one of the most widely read sites for broadcasters, content owners, OTT providers, Wall Street money managers, and industry executives. He also has a podcast at danrayburnpodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected]