Enhancing our expertise to grow our business
In addition to organic growth, the Group continued to develop through acquisitions. These provided the Group with additional expertise in strategic areas such as content protection and new web 2.0 solutions. They also enabled the Group to better control the evolution of its global digital TV offering.
OpenTV: an important link in our global offering
In order to have a better control of the strategic development of its middleware and interactive advertising offering, the Group launched in October 2009 a public tender offer in view of the acquisition of all outstanding class A shares in OpenTV, following the acquisition of a majority stake in this company in 2007. The tender offer ended successfully at the end of 2009.
OpenTV's know-how enables the Group to further improve its solution offering to cover the entire digital television ecosystem.
Medialive – enhanced content protection
In October 2009, the Kudelski Group acquired all the share capital of Medialive, a Paris-based company that Nagravision has been collaborating with for several years. Medialive develops and licenses innovative and patented content protection and marking technologies and has filed over 20 patent applications over the last nine years.
With the emergence of new piracy threats generated by the internet, Nagravision decided to further improve its content protection technologies in order to bring new security solutions to the pay-TV market. Medialive's expertise will complement Nagravision's competencies in the areas of audiovisual compression, video players, internet streaming technologies, DRM and watermarking technologies in various environments.
This acquisition will combine the Kudelski Group's strengths in conditional access with Medialive's innovative encryption and watermarking technologies.
Medioh! – Innovative combination of web and TV
In September 2009, the Kudelski Group acquired Medioh!, a Denver-based media technology company founded in 2007. Medioh! aggregates mid-tail content and provides a widget and content-publishing platform for multimedia devices. This acquisition demonstrates the Group's increasing focus on more actively developing web-enabled service platform solutions across its extensive digital TV customer base.
Along with the fast growing number of connected devices, this acquisition strengthens the Group's global DTV portfolio and provides end-users with a personalized TV experience. Medioh!'s specialized web 2.0 R&D team will further strengthen the Group's expertise in the core Digital TV business.