Telestream Acquires Anystream

Telestream, based in Nevada City, California, announced on Friday, August 13, that it was acquiring Anystream‘s assets and business operations from parent company, Grab Networks.

Many EventDVLive readers will be familiar with Telestream, as the company makes Wirecast, a live webcasting software package, which recently debuted version 4 at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show and was selected to our “Winner’s Circle” Best of NAB list.

In addition, the company built Flip4Mac, which allows WindowsMedia content to play back via a QuickTime Player plug-in on Macintosh computers, and has leveraged the Popwire acquisition from a few years ago to provide a desktop and workgroup transcoding solution in its Episode series of products.

But Telestream’s claim to fame over the past few years has been FlipFactory, a product similar to Agility—the main product being acquired—in that it’s a workgroup and enterprise-based transcoding solution.

The company has also been hard at work creating a brand new workflow-based transcoding and live encoding product, Vantage. I’ve had several days of extensive hands-on work on Vantage over the past month as part of a larger comparative study of professional encoding solutions,  which will be released just prior the IBC international broadcasting tradeshow in Amsterdam next month.

Knowing Vantage’s strengths and potential to replace FlipFactory within a few rev cycles, I was curious as to why Telestream acquired Anystream.

I contacted Janet Swift, Telestream’s marketing communications manager, to ask a few questions regarding the acquisition. When asked about the details of how Agility product line fits between Episode, FlipFactory, and Vantage, Swift said that’s a work in progress, with the ink still drying on the agreement. Swift added:

Now that the definitive agreement has been signed, the next step is to plan the integration of our product lines. We believe that Anystream products complement Telestream’s offerings and expect our next phase of integration to be available shortly…

While the products do similar things at their cores, the overlap is less than you might think. We frequently see customers who use both Anystream and Telestream solutions in different workflows…

Our job now is to gain an understanding from the customers and our own analysis of each area of strength and bring those together into a unified strategy moving forward. We’re working on that now and will begin to share more of that as we get closer to IBC 2010.

The company has scheduled a press conference on Friday, September 10, 2010, at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam, which should provide additional information.

Finally, when asked about the size of the newly combined Telestream-Anystream, which also gives Telestream a significant East Coast presence, Swift pointed towards two levels of dominance. “We believe this acquisition propels Telestream into the dominant leadership position in the enterprise-class video transcoding market. First, Telestream offers the market the broadest suite of digital media tools and workflow solutions based on unique transcoding technologies, enabling media and entertainment companies to streamline their operations, reach broader audiences and generate more revenue from their media.

“Second, Telestream is delivering the industry’s only desktop-to-enterprise-class live and file-based transcoding and multi-file format and workflow software solutions,” said Swift, pointing out that Telestream is also in the live encoding game, despite being overshadowed by bigger live encoding/streaming players. “We think the acquisition will further enable media and entertainment customers to gain strategic competitive advantage through its world-class offerings for video on demand and live streaming.”

A press release announcing the acquisition provides more details.

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.