Jason Flick, co-founder of the Ottawa-based OTT technology startup You.i TV, is departing the company, following WarnerMedia’s purchase of the firm last month in a deal now reported to be worth around $100 million.
The figure and the news come courtesy of the Ottawa Business Journal, to which the 50-year-old Flick explained his seemingly amicable departure and his rationale for making the deal with the media conglomerate.
“We had something like 18 active projects going on with (Warner),” Flick told OBJ, in a Monday interview. “That’s going to be their priority. You don’t need an entrepreneur for that.”
Also read: WarnerMedia Buys Canadian OTT App Development Company You.i TV
Founded in 2010 as a company providing OTT video technologies to media companies, You.i TV raised $38.1 million through seed, series B and series C rounds of funding.
With a finite group of major media conglomerates, including WarnerMedia looking to get their content on “every piece of glass,” You.i TV needed expansion capital to keep up, Flick said.
“You’ve got to be a $100-million-a-year business, and we weren’t there yet. We were well on our way to getting to that, but we needed a D-round to get to an IPO," he explained.
Alas, Flick added, “We were not able to package ourselves properly (to potential investors). D-rounds in Canada are difficult …. We were a stone’s throw from cash-flow break-even, but that’s not really the business I wanted to run. We wanted to change the world.”
You.i TV makes OTT applications for media companies, including WarnerMedia and its parent company, AT&T, servicing the multi-platform needs of brands including including AT&T TV Now, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live and Rooster Teeth. Notably, You.i TV’s technology is the foundation for WarnerMedia’s recently launched RIDE in-car streaming platform.
The company’s You.i Engine One enterprise development platform delivers video apps across mobile, tablet, game consoles, streaming devices, set-top boxes and smart TVs using a single codebase. The single codebase approach allows developers to build app features and make user experience changes once and then deploy across a variety of devices and operating systems, saving time and speeding delivery.
