Two years ago the company said in a regulatory filing that it planned to go public. However, as the equities market began to deteriorate, the company pulled back their planned IPO, preferring to wait for better market conditions.
Apparently they believe that those conditions have arrived. Since their original filing, Eyeblaster’s profit has grown by about a third from $7.4 million in 2007 to $9.8 million in 2009 while revenue jumped to $65.1 million from $44.7 million.
JPMorgan Securities Inc. and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. are serving as the lead underwriters for the deal. Ed Note: I am a former employee of Eyeblaster and holder of stock options in the company.
On the heals of Livestream’s open letter to the industry about piracy of live streamed content, it wasn’t long before a quinticential example pops up.
While ABC initially cut off access to Cablevision during their dispute (access was restored at approximately 8:45PM EST, disgruntled viewers are turning to the web for their OSCAR content. In addition to the legal pre-award show content being offered, as predicted, Justin.TV is hosting multiple streams of the show. Even better, there’s a Cablevision ad running as an overlay on top of the pirated content.
Oh, how ’bout that. Guess what’s on Ch.7? The OSCARS. I’m going back to watching on real TV instead of the pirated stream.
UPDATED: Disney and ABC have apparently reached an agreement “in principle.” Access to ABC was restored on the Cablevision network at approximately 8:45 PM EST approximately 30 minutes into the Oscars broadcast.
The months long public battle between ABC and Cablevision over retransmission rights fees came to a head today when ABC pulled the plug on the cable operator and removed the channel from 3 million Cablevision households ahead of Sunday’s Oscars telecast. In an e-mail to customers Cablevision directed viewers to the web for live coverage on E!, Livestream and the LA Times Gold Derby blog.
We have seen a number of disputes like this come down to the Wire but it’s rare that it results in a service disruption – by pulling the plug on the eve of a high profile event like the Oscars ABC is making a very public statement. Whether it will work out for ABC, and if the network broadcast model itself is still viable are still very open quesyions.
Cablevision charges ABC with demanding unreasonably high fees to carry the network, a message on the Cablevision homepage claims ABC is demanding $40 million more on top of the $200 million it receives. According to Reuters “Disney executives have privately disputed those numbers.”
The latest is that the companies have agreed to binding arbitration. Eventually Cablevision will give ABC a little more money and the network will be back in Cabvlevision homes. But the bigger question is whether the broadcast network model can be profitable when competing with thousands of specific cable channels and millions of specific online video channels.
NBC’s Community will be back for another season and Executive Producer Dan Harmon took the opportunity to capture his announcement to the cast and upload it to yfrog. It’s since been picked up by Brian Stelter in The Times Media Decoder column and the news is all over Twitter.
“This is an internet site that will very quickly become a repository of 5% curiosity seekers and 95% free floating dongs. But I’m sure you can make even that sound like news.” (via)
