Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/12/telstra_buys_cloudy_pvr_outfit_ooyala_for_us270_million/

Telstra puts US$270 million into cloudy PVR biz Ooyala

Lining up the digital ducks: rights plus platform

By Richard Chirgwin

Posted in On-Prem, 12th August 2014 03:03 GMT

Telstra has snapped up 98 per cent of digital TV streaming service Ooyala, a Silicon Valley outfit that it says combines streaming with analytics.

In slinging US$270 million, the carrier is wrapping up the kind of TV retransmission that lost Optus a court case two years ago, when its TV Now service was ruled illegal by Australia's High Court.

The difference, of course, is rights ownership: Telstra can get access to rights that Optus can't, with major sports like the AFL and NRL wrapped up, and a 50 per cent stake in Foxtel.

In its announcement, Telstar describes Ooyala as “a personalised video platform as an end-to-end cloud solution service, which saves customers high upfront investments in online video infrastructure and helps increase the return on their content.”

Oolaya is the full cross-platform play, able to stream content to TVs, smartphones and tablets – which means, just like TV Now did, the cloud service is also handling the transcoding of video into different formats. ®