Amino Acquires Booxmedia, The Cloud-TV Platform Founded By Ex-Nokians, For €7.9M

Booxmedia, the Finnish cloud-TV platform founded by ex-Nokians, has seen an exit today. The Helsinki-headquartered company has been acquired by Cambridge, U.K.-based and AIM-listed IPTV provider Amino for €7.9 million.

The acquisition price initially comprises €7.2m in cash and €0.7m in Amino shares, but will be topped up by €2.6m, shared equally between cash and stock, dependent on Booxmedia meeting revenue targets over the next three years.

Founded in 2009 but based on an idea and (and some technology) developed at Nokia from 2007, Booxmedia offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud TV platform to let various kinds of TV providers offer their customers an OTT service.

Its core product enables operators and service providers — think quad-play companies, for example — to launch “TV everywhere” services via Booxmedia’s ‘off-the-shelf’ cloud platform, negating the need for them to build their own bespoke technology and infrastructure. This includes media capture, encoding, transcoding, storage and delivery.

Regards the latter, Booxmedia has TV apps for iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices, as well as a browser-based version targeting smart TVs, games consoles, and set-top boxes.

Other features of the platform include HD quality streaming of live TV; access to catch-up TV, video on demand and cloud-based recording; ‘follow-me’ functionality enabling playback of content to be started on one device and continued on another; and the ability to turn your smartphone into an “intelligent” remote control for any internet-connected TV screen, for which Booxmedia holds a patent.

The Nokia backstory is interesting. Booxmedia’s concept was originally developed at Nokia as part of the then handset giant’s home communications business. The idea was to explore how to remotely consume TV/video content and other media typically accessed at home, including recorded TV, on smartphones. However, when Nokia started to downsize in 2009 many such development programs got the axe.

Four of the Booxmedia team then left Nokia to further develop the cloud TV platform independently, supported by the latter’s Innovation Mill program (.pdf), which gave support and a small amount of funding to startups founded by recently departed Nokians. Today Booxmedia has a core team of close to 20 people in Helsinki, but also a similar-sized development team in Asia.