TORONTO – Canadian Internet broadcaster JumpTV is expanding its product offering from its current roster of ethnic channels to a large, English language sports offering.
Jump announced Tuesday it has purchased the broadband network business unit of XOS Technologies for US$60.25 million to be paid mostly in cash and 3 million retention warrants for XOS employees. The new unit brings more than 150 U.S. college, university and other sporting properties from popular American college conferences like the SEC, Big 12 and Big 10.
The XOS Technologies sports channels have 24,000 paid subscribers and had 4.9 million unique visitors in March 2007, said the press release.
According to the Jump release, the broadband network business unit of XOS is one of the largest online global sports networks streaming thousands of NCAA games including football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball and track & field events. It has more than 150 official and exclusive broadband relationships with U.S. colleges, universities, conferences and professional sports teams.
"XOS Broadband Network designs and powers multiplatform broadband environments which include branded broadband video channels for its sports partners. Each broadband video channel provides exclusive live and on-demand video streaming for games and event content," reads the release.
In addition, the Broadband Network includes its proprietary “One Fan Profile” capability that includes the XOS Total Ticketing platform, event registration services and e-commerce solutions. Like JumpTV, the XOS Broadband Network typically has long-term exclusive agreements with its content partners and shares revenue generated by customers and advertising.
“The acquisition stays true to JumpTV’s focus on IPTV for displaced communities interested in unique, hard-to-find and high-affinity content — whether for ethnic immigrants or sports fans living far away from local television markets,” said Scott Paterson, chairman and chief executive officer of JumpTV in the release. “Sports programming on JumpTV is consistently amongst our most watched content. Adding the expertise of the XOS Network will accelerate our ability to obtain rights to important international sporting properties.”
After the acquisition, JumpTV’s ethnic programming business will be grouped in a newly named “JumpTV International” division with key sporting assets like JumpTV’s www.SportsYa.com web site and properties such as FIFA championship soccer tournaments in Canada, Euro2008 qualifying matches, Egyptian Football Federation and Israeli Football League transferring to the JumpTVSports division.
Nada Usina, the current president of the Broadband Network Division of XOS, will continue in her position and will join the executive team of JumpTV. She has more than a decade of experience in the sports, entertainment, media and technology industries. Prior to joining XOS, Usina served as the president of Nokia Canada and as director of entertainment business development and sales programs at Yahoo! The Broadband Network business unit of XOS generated on an unaudited basis US$2.45 million of revenue in the five months ending May 30th, 2007 and an operating loss of US$3.17 million during the same period. Unaudited revenue and loss for calendar 2006 was US$4,258,000 and US$6,797,000 respectively.
"Given the current growth dynamics of the XOS Network business unit and the upcoming fall collegiate sports seasons, the company believes that the financial results in the latter half of the year will exceed the first half," says the release.
In 2006 the XOS Network streamed more than 7,000 different live sporting events and currently averages more than 1,500 live streamed events per month. The company anticipates streaming more than 14,000 events in 2007. The sports that had the largest following in 2006 included:
* Basketball with over 3,000 games
* Football with over 1,200,
* Baseball with over 1,000,
* Volleyball with over 500,
* Soccer with over 300
Jump itself had approximately US$127 million in cash as of June 30th, 2007 and had approximately 34,148 subscriptions and 29,968 subscribers as of June 30th, 2007, a less than 1% decline from reported levels for each on March 31st, 2007—"materially better than the Company expected given the launch of 60 (now 110) channels free-to-consumer in the United States as of May 24th, 2007," says the release.
