NAB News: Imagine Communications Acquires Digital Rapids, Estimate Deal Value At $100M-$150M

If you’re looking for a theme at NAB this year, look no further than media management and the video ecosystem as being the hot topics. Imagine Communications, formerly called Harris Broadcast, announced it has acquired privately held Digital Rapids. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I put the price above $100M. Digital Rapids had about $35M in revenue for 2013, so if their projected 2014 revenue was given a valuation of about 3x, which seems to be the average in the space right now, that puts the deal between $100M-$150M in size. Digital Rapids specializes on helping broadcasters with their ingesting, encoding, transcoding and broadcast workflow.

Imagine Communication has confirmed that Digital Rapids President and CEO Brick Eksten along with his management team will be joining Imagine Communications. Specifically, Brick will lead efforts for a significant portion of their next generation cloud-based workflow platform. Digital Rapids has a main location in Toronto, which is less than five miles from Imagine Communications existing Development Center and the majority of Digital Rapids employees will move to the Imagine Communications facility nearby. Imagine Communications said the vast majority of Digital Rapids employees are engineers who will support key R&D developments underway at Imagine, but also included are customer support, key sales, and other employees.

Imagine Communications acquisition of Digital Rapids now gives the company high-end media processing applications that will strengthen their TV Everywhere business, which seems to be getting more traction as of late. Imagine Communications has made a lot of moves over the past few months and is an interesting company to keep an eye on. I suspect the company has one or two smaller acquisitions they are working on to further strengthen their video workflow platform for broadcasters.