Tiny Eagle Broadband, a US satellite specialist company that offers satellite voice and IPTV delivery services, quietly filed for Chapter XI bankruptcy during November.
The company says that it will carry on trading under the court’s protection. Among other things it offers IPTV from one of the Iridium satellites, as an end to end system for local US telcos to offer IPTV, sharing the 200 channel Eagle Broadband head end, and buying specially designed set tops from the company.
Recently the SES Americom service IP Prime and a new service from EchoStar that offers much the same, has likely eclipsed the Eagle offerings, and its revenue has spiraled from it being a $30 million business a few years ago to where it lost $26 million on $3.9 million of revenue in 2006.
Today the business has just $1 million in the bank and since it has burned through $5 million during the past nine months, it felt it needed the court’s protection.
As recently as October it tried IPO, with much of the proceeds going to settle an old debt with an investor which trailed back into 2004. In November it pulled the registration and chose instead to file Chapter XI with the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. Eagle says it will continue as a debtor-in-possession business but now has revenues of just $800,000 for its third quarter.