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Cycling.tv owner Simon Brydon, pictured, is to stay in charge of the London-based operation. At the Tour de France prologue Brydon told BikeBiz.com a sale was in the offing and now it’s official.
JumpTV Inc. streams live television over the internet. In web parlance, JumpTV is a narrowcaster not a broadcaster.
The company will pay US$4.95m in cash and stock to acquire Cycling TV Ltd.
Cycling TV holds the internet broadcast rights to races such as the Vuelta a Espana, one of the and the Amstel Gold Race. During the Tour de France Cycling.tv produced a daily highlights package for ASO, owners of the race, and the cycling narrowcaster also provides the material for UCI.tv, the channel offered on the website of the Union Cycliste Internationale. Cycling.tv also produces the video content at Interbike’s impressive Media Center.
Some of Cycling.tv’s content is free-to-air, other packages – such as the Vuelta – are subscription-based. Cycling.tv’s income stream also includes revenue from advertising.
JumpTV CEO Scott Paterson said: "This acquisition is in line with our pursuit of exclusive, hard-to-find and high-affinity internet video content."
The sale price is £1.09m in cash and £1.34m in common stock.
Cycling.tv generated £229,860 of revenue in the 5 months ending May 31st and recorded an operating loss of £167,411. The turnover for 2006 was £376,795.
Cycling.tv currently has 18,000 paying subscribers. Cycling.tv gets 130,000 unique visitors a month.
Simon Brydon said: "We are delighted that Cycling.tv has found a perfect home at JumpTV. By becoming a part of the JumpTV team, we are instantly able to leverage our existing roster of top-tier cycling events and industry know-how with JumpTV’s proprietary content delivery network, its ‘Jumper’ API media player and global distribution partnerships — factors which we believe will add experiential value to our viewers, expand our overall viewership and add to the value proposition for our advertisers."
"To date Cycling.tv has focused on the sport of professional bike racing and while this will always be core to the company, this also gives us an opportunity to develop our leisure cycling and recreational biking content which we believe will widen our appeal even further."
