Seachange International’s On Demand Group has signed a joint venture deal with Tele Munchen Gruppe, the German TV channel owner and media investor, to offer pay per view and VoD services in the German speaking market.
The two companies said that the German speaking market across Germany, Austria and Switzerland takes in some 45 million homes and is one of the largest in Europe.
On Demand Group (ODG) is now 100% owned by Seachange, but was set up by a team of ex-BSkyB managers in November 2004 after the European Commission cleared the creation of a video on demand services company owned by Sony and Disney, which then partnered with ODG to form Filmflex.
Seachange provided the VoD hardware systems that delivered VoD services through FilmFlex to NTL and Telewest, now Virgin Media, offering content from the BBC, Nickelodeon, Jetix, Warner Music, Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax, Path’, Icon Films and Playboy TV.
In September 2005 Seachange paid £7.6 Million ($13.4 million) to buy the 72% of ODG it didn’t own
On Demand Group says that today it’s the only UK company with access to VoD content from ALL of the US major studios, and it lists Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, Sony’s Columbia TriStar, Paramount, Warner Brothers, MGM and Walt Disney.
Speaking to Tom Rosenstein, VP business development of Seachange at this week’s Connected Home conference in London, he told us that the idea behind ODG was to service any TV operator in Europe that did not have the expertise to negotiate with the large US studios and said that so far the deal in Germany, and a previous deal at Corvette Telecom in Russia, were the first European steps outside of the UK, hinting that there would be more.
Rosenstein said that Seachange was still predominantly a VoD hardware supplier to the cable community, but its revenue was close to 10% from content aggregation.
Rosenstein also explained the shift by Seachange towards IPTV middleware, a move it announced at last year’s IBC. That product is yet to be widely installed but came out of buying a copy of the source code of the IPTV middleware offered by specialist Minerva, and said that owning its own middleware would eventually give it account control and integration points for IPTV systems.