Rightster Has Two-Pronged Approach in Consolidating Leadership Position in Online Video
Much is afoot in the online video industry. The lions are currently bent on consolidating their market niches and buying up or partnering with strategic tech start ups and services providers to command untouchable market shares in a sector that defines the internet spirit of explosive, ultra-popular and socially conscious growth. One of them is Rightster Group PLC, which is listed in the London Stock Exchange as a “…cloud-based global video distribution and monetisation network that enables content owners to upload content once and commercialise everywhere.” These are clear and present terms that lies at the heart of a game-changing industry, created by the video generation and supported by the conversion of millions of new followers every month.
Rightster Group recently acquired Viral Management’s Viral Spiral by placing 75 million new ordinary shares before expenses through the investment firm Cenkos Securities. The placing is expected to raise some £42 million at 56 pence a share. Viral Spiral went for a total consideration of £4.1 million (£1.75 million in cash and 950,120 of the new shares). It is a leader in identifying the hottest video trends and putting out the most influential viral content, adept at utilizing VML (Vector Markup Language), a graphic language platform for vector graphic information like HTML is the platform for the markup of text.Viral Spiral is a class act with its main strength focused on social video management, licensing and brand engagement.
Next on the agenda is the proposed Rightster acquisition of Base79 for a total consideration of £50 million (£25 million in structured cash outlay and an assured maximum of £25 million worth in new shares after a year in the market). This is the more financially ambitious part of Rightster’s declared intent. Base79 is an MCN (multi-channel network) with over 1,500 YouTube Channels and 750 million viewers monthly. It is the largest network outside North America, is one of the top five YouTube MCNs in North America, and probably is YouTube’s largest provider of original content.
Together with Rightster’s own global b2b (business to business) sourcing, commercial distribution and audience engagement network that reaches gn0 million views a month, the two will create a newly-fashioned online video company with unparalleled reach and scope. When the dust settles, we will find it with over 2,000 YouTube channels, with a combined video traffic of 1.1 billion views per month. The three companies involved are what The Huffington Post’s Andy Plesser calls “the…biggest protagonists in [the video ecosystem]”. With the triple merger, the world of high finance and its media watchers have just woken up to the great possibilities of online video as an enterprise that will command the largest turnovers of the future. The New Rightster and its leadership will now rub elbows with the biggest names in business, after years of struggling to make their niche industry commercially viable. They will be respected, saluted and emulated for their vision, which has mainly been an unswerving faith in online technology and a non-traditional approach of promoting global brotherhood through the visual exchange of cultural values, personal information and the common stories that bind ordinary citizens throughout the world.