Arris shelled out the big bucks to lock down Motorola Home last year, but it appears that its recent acquisition of SeaWell Networks marked a return to the company's more frugal ways.
Arris, which announced its acquisition of the adaptive bit rate streaming specialist last month, revealed in its 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it paid approximately $5.7 million for Ontario-based SeaWell. That’s somewhat of a bargain considering that SeaWell, founded in 2008, had raised about $15 million, according to TechCrunch data.
SeaWell was Arris’s first acquisition since closing its $2.35 billion acquisition of Motorola Home, the maker of set-tops and network gear. SeaWell founder and CEO Brian Collie was among the SeaWell employees that joined Arris following the closure of the acquisition on April 17.
Arris said SeaWell gives it some key video streaming packaging capabilities, including just-in-time packaging systems that allow service providers to save on storage space by rapidly packaging adaptive bit rates streams into their appropriate platform, device format and right resolution as the end user requests them. SeaWell, which had notched deals with the Nemont Telephone Cooperative and Time Warner Cable before being acquired, also makes a manifest manipulation technology that enables next-gen targeted advertising and personalized video services.
During Arris’s first quarter earnings call last week, company chairman and CEO Bob Stanzione referred to SeaWell as a “tuck-in or an enabler” that Arris will integrate into its Network & Cloud business and the unit's continued development of its multiscreen IP video delivery capabilities.
“It blends in nicely to our broader strategy around multiscreen and IP video” he said, pointing to ongoing work on network DVR and TV Everywhere technologies. Stanzione also said SeaWell’s technology will also help Arris in the area of targeted IP video ad insertion.
