Last week we prematurely said goodbye to Move Networks, after various blogs ‘ particular NewTeeVee – in the US reported that the company was for sale and had fired all its staff. The for sale part is true, seen clearly in the form of a press statement on its web site.
But the troubled streaming company is mid-transition from a purely adaptive streaming play to a full IPTV business, operating over both the internet and private network, and is now targeting telcos.
It put out a release on June 30 that it will appoint a financial advisor to help evaluate strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company. Clearly cash is tight and a recent round of cash raising went undersubscribed. This led to CEO Roxanne Austin, once the COO of DirecTV, who came to the company a year ago, falling on her sword and Marcus Liassides, who was the CEO of Inuk Networks, the UK IPTV company it acquired in April 2009, promoted to run day to day operations.
Move says it remains committed to supporting its IPTV customers in the US, Europe and the Middle East and people we spoke to this week at the company said it was business as usual and attributed the bad press the company was having as the outpourings of disgruntled ex-employees. All the staff have certainly not be fired, although there have been some layoffs, they said. As far as we can work out it retains a significant number of what was well over 100 employees, but that might be anything from 30 to 80 and the company is not saying.
To us it looks like this is a company pulled in two very different directions and having a mix of investors – Steamboat Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, Microsoft, Cisco, Comcast and Televisa ‘ where for instance Microsoft is very much keen not to see Move become a direct rival in the Telco space in IPTV, but wants it to continue being part of its adaptive streaming Silverlight strategy.
As far as we can work out Inuk holds the key to its new direction and that direction was set before the outgoing CEO, came on board. The idea 15 months ago, when it bought Inuk was that although Move holds some leading IPR in the area of adaptive streaming, too many rivals have emerged which offer some form of adaptive service. The company needed a new focus and that was Inuk, which would instead dump its reliance on an IPTV multicast, and deploy a streaming process in a genuine IPTV network ‘ delivered through a localized cache, in a manner that was akin to multicast. Most major Telcos don’t have multicast enabled routers in their broadband access networks, and using this approach don’t have to upgrade to them for IPTV. In order to support IPTV they now peer with the Move head end, and use HTTP caches as close as possible to their ISAMs in their local exchanges.
It makes for IPTV at a fraction of the cost of multicast versions, and it benefits from having the proprietary Move streaming, as well as the Inuk PC based virtual set top technology and means that Move can target slightly backward or underinvested Telcos who would otherwise not be able to use IPTV. It can use set tops, PCs or phones (such as the iPhone) as a client device.
For outlying regions for such a telco, where it has insufficient bandwidth on its private network, the same head end can supply directly over the internet instead and Inuk had installations at Cable and Wireless in the Caribbean and the Channel Islands as examples of this. Move is trying to make the same kind of connection among smaller US incumbent telcos.
But even this is going to put Move in a competitive space. Back in November Mediaroom partnered to offer a hosted version of IPTV called Cirrus, offered to smaller US telcos, where many costs, such as the head end, are shared. And in January Mediaroom moved to fill a hole in its own product line, with Version 2.0 extending adaptive streaming using its own IIS servers, for existing Mediaroom customers. This will make it possible to extend Mediaroom over the open internet to new devices and so offer the same programming as IPTV services, for instance streamed to handsets.
And at the same time Move is now going up against established IPTV middleware players like Minerva, which has long carved out a business offering IPTV to local telcos in the US.
Move will need a fraction of its existing employees to continue this business and the Move streaming technology can probably lose a big chunk of its pure R&D base which used to keep it ahead of streaming developments, so those cuts may have been quite substantial. The question is just what kind of company might buy Move, and why would anyone even do that until it has a substantial installed base for its new IPTV product line. Meanwhile older Move streaming customers are shifting to alternative suppliers who are cheaper.