Ooyala, the video company that was acquired by Telstra earlier this year, has now made an acquisition of its own. It has bought Videoplaza, a UK-based video advertising startup. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we are trying to find out. It’s potentially a very valuable deal when you consider the reach of Videoplaza. The company says that more than half of all the broadcasters in Europe were running their advertising businesses on its Karbon platform. It’s also making bigger moves into programmatic advertising.
This is Ooyala’s first acquisition, and is a mark of how Telstra is investing into its new $270 million acquisition to put it to work. The acquisition will give Ooyala a much stronger, in-house advertising play on top of its video services, and it will likely see Videoplaza, which has mainly been active in Europe and Asia-Pacific, move further into the U.S. market.
The move is a mark of how heated the video advertising market has become. Other notable acquisitions in the space have included Opera buying AdColony on the mobile front, and AOL (our owner) buying AdaptTV.
Videoplaza had raised only $12 million in three rounds of funding since being founded in 2008. Investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Innovacom, Creandum and Northzone.
It looks like Ooyala and Telstra will be making more purchases and investments, too. “For Ooyala, this acquisition is the first step in a multi-step strategy aimed at establishing global leadership in personalized cloud TV and video,” the company notes.
Ooyala is playing this up as an end-to-end strategy, covering content acquisition and workflow, playback experience, ad serving, programmatic trading, personalized content recommendation, and real-time analytics for audience behavior as well as content and ad performance. It looks like the two will run separately but eventually get integrated.
“Ooyala helps media companies build the largest possible audiences online, while Videoplaza helps them extract as much value as possible from that audience. Our combined platforms will offer a more holistic view of content and ad performance across a broadcaster’s entire business, including granular data on not only what, how and where people are watching, but also where and how they can make the most money,” said Ooyala CEO Jay Fulcher in a statement. “Videoplaza’s team has clearly demonstrated strong leadership in the fast-growing video advertising market, and are closely aligned with our vision for growth and innovation in this new line of business.”
Videoplaza founder and CEO Sorosh Tavakoli and his exec team will be coming on as part of the acquisition to run Ooyala’s ad business.