Telestream Will Be Acquired by Thoma Bravo, Investment Firm
Telestream announced today that private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo, LLC, has entered a definitive agreement to purchase the encoding and transcoding company.
The acquisition should close in January, 2012. Financial terms weren't disclosed by either party. Telestream will continue to be based in Nevada City, California, and will continue with its existing management. According to Telestream, the company has been profitable since 2001, and has previously self-financed acquisitions of Popwire, Vara Software, and Anystream. This acquisition will help the company grow its core business and expand into new markets and acquisitions, says Telestream.
"The video ecosystem continues to grow and expand as customers require increasingly complex tools to manage their end-to-end video workflows," says A.J. Rohde, vice president at Thoma Bravo. "Thoma Bravo sees significant opportunity in the digital media market, and Telestream is well positioned as a strong platform for increased investment in the industry."
The Future of Video
Kevin Louden, a product manager at Telestream, was interviewed at the recent Streaming Media West conference about the future -- not the future of Telestream, but the future of video now that we've seen the last of tape-based video cameras.
In the last year, said Louden, all three major camera makers ceased producing tape cameras. It's a move he finds exciting.
"It opens up a whole new realm of filmmaking," said Louden.
While we're streaming 720p and 1080p high-definition videos now, Louden says it won't be long before we have 2K and 4K streams going to the living room. Along with bigger, higher-resolution TV screens will come higher bandwidth Internet connections. Home viewers will enjoy surround sound audio and an almost movie theater-quality experience without needing a Blu-ray Disk.
The challenge to a high-resolution world is paying more attention to detail at every step along the way to make sure the image is crisp and clear. While that future is years away, Louden can't wait.
"Unfortunately, I've spent a lot of my time watching highly compressed, small pictures," he said.
Editing bigger streams will require more powerful computers, likely relying on GPU-acceleration to keep up with the high color precision in the files.
"I like how far we've come, from postage [stamp-sized video] to this. I'm really excited to see what's going to happen next year and the year after that," said Louden.
Scroll down to view the entire interview.
These Streaming Media Red Carpet Interviews are sponsored by Front Porch Digital.
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