Neulion Is Going After The International Market
... after hours of due diligence - I'm feeling very very good about Neulion's prospects. The market may be nervous about the MLBAM/BAM Tech Spinoff...but BAM Tech would be a North American play...and Neulion seems to be going more and more after the international market where BAM Tech has no clear advantage relative to Neulion (ie. Univision, NBA International, Sky NZ, etc)....I clearly understand why Neulion may be a takeover target - and actually - I can see why - after BAM Tech spins off in January 2016 - why Neulion might be the first acquisition - they truly have an international portfolio ALONG with north American name brands (NFL, NBA) - that would be a perfect launch pad for BAM Tech...considering BAM tech is being valued at anywhere from 2 to 5 billion dollars - and Neulion - with almost as many employees (500 vs 800)...at $139M market cap - this is a steal (yes BAM Tech has $800M in revenues relative to NLN's $90M but most of that is ticketing and other businesses - not streaming). do your own due diligence...... ____ this was as of April 30 2015... At TV connect we got a chance to talk to Tom Huntington about the NeuLion digital platform which is currently powering the NHL Game Pass along with other online sports steaming services bringing the NBA and NFL leagues to European viewers. Huntington is new at NeuLion, he came from software encoder specialist DivX who were acquired by NeuLion in January this year. DivX began with its open-source MPEG 4 codec in 2001 and acquired H.264 encoder specialist MainConcept in 2007 and has since moved onto developing its own HEVC codec. The acquisition by NeuLion was driven by this DivX HEVC codec. The codec is classified as a 4K codec, but Huntington claimed that it could adapt to the full 60 fps UHD standard. So far the NeuLion platform is enjoying success with online sports casts, and during a brief demo of the platform we were shown some sports-orientated features such as tiling for multiple camera angles, automatic timeline-snapshots for highlights (plus automatic VoD highlight creation with a two minute delay), and statistics integration. Although the quality of the streams didnt exactly blow us away. The monetization and management backend appears to function as it should. The management system is granular, showing individual clients and reporting on their QoS, location and entitlements, so that users can access content from multiple sources powered by the NeuLion platform. The idea of providing daily passes at $5 a pop struck us as a good sell for the casual sports fans still on the fence about pricey monthly subscriptions. The rights to stream live sporting events are not easily won. In this instance this is about say the NBA trying to offer its own service while not ruining the bidding for TV rights to much the same content. Its technology suppliers must be first class, or it wont be able to make extra revenue from the online content. Over time, major US sports have a declared aim to get sufficient revenue, to the point where each sport may no longer require broadcast TV as a distributor, and have its own full content relationship with the public. Huntington told us that in order to win over the NBA, NeuLion streamed (at about 50 mbps over BTs network) a live game played in London, at 4K-50fps, to New York under the watchful eyes of NBA execs. NeuLion hopes to expand its reach further into Europe with deals being drafted with Sky Sports and Sky News in the UK for the platform to host Premier League soccer games. NeuLion is also working with Rogers in Canada and Univision in Spain (leveraging the Spanish rights to World Cup soccer matches) hosting TV everywhere services for sports channels. When asked whether the platform was likely to see full integration into an OTT service, and not just a select few sports channels, Huntington told us its what NeuLion is working towards with the platform, and its part of its plan to expand into Europe, due to the larger number of smaller tier operators getting into OTT, but it cannot report a win at this stage.