Billing, OSS and customer care giant Amdocs announced Tuesday that it has inked a definitive deal to acquire Vubiquity, a distributor of premium content services, for about $224 million in cash.
The boards of directors of both companies have approved the deal, which is expected to close by the end of Q2 2018.
RELATED: Vubiquity Names Heiting Head of North American Sales
The acquisition extends Amdocs’s reach more deeply into the world of premium multiscreen content distribution. Vubiquity works with several major content owners and distributors, including Time Warner, Disney, Comcast and Sky, as well as OTT players such as Netflix and Amazon.
“This acquisition uniquely positions Amdocs at the center of increased convergence across the content community and video distributors including major OTT providers,” Eli Gelman, president and CEO of Amdocs, said in a statement. "Our joint offerings address the media and entertainment industry’s challenge in balancing the incredible growth of content and the many ways to consume content with making programming easier, faster to deliver and ultimately watch, while also delivering profits.”
Vubiquity, formerly known as Avail-TVN before a rebranding of the company in March 2013, was formed in 2009 via a merger of Avail Media and TVN Entertainment.
Darcy Antonellis, formerly the president, technical operations and CTO of Warner Bros., was named CEO of Vubiquity in December 2013. That role became effective on Jan. 2, 2014. Following the closing of the deal, Antonellis will join Amdocs as head of the company’s Media Division.
“Vubiquity has successfully been connecting content owners and distributors across many diverse platforms and evolving business models at the core of its support to the media community,” Antonellis said in the release announcing the deal. “Our capabilities, coupled with Amdocs’ global scale and rich set of complementary solutions around monetization, analytics and personalized customer experience will be truly unique, allowing us to deliver to a larger set of customers while solving key industry challenges. his includes helping video distributors deliver additional profitable offerings, as well as enabling content owners to focus on content creation and maximizing licensing revenues.”
In this week’s issue of Multichannel News, Antonellis was recognized as a member of the publication's annual class of Wonder Women.
RELATED: Hard Work and a Helping Hand Pay Off (subscription required)
The impact of the acquisition on Amdocs’ diluted non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be neutral in fiscal year 2018, and accretive thereafter, the company said.
Amdocs posted fiscal Q1 revenue of $977.7 million, up 2.4% from the year-ago quarter, and net income of $116.9 million, or $0.80 per diluted share.
