Ericsson Media Solutions has emerged as MediaKind, the new brand being announced at a global event, anchored in London Tuesday.
The brand is being brought in immediately, though the deal with new majority owner private equity firm One Equity Partners is not expected to complete until the third quarter of 2018.
CEO Angel Ruiz said the outlook of the new owners was very similar to that of Ericsson. While the market was consolidating in areas such as compression, encoding, video storage and platforms, it still had less than a 12 per cent share. “When Ericsson started to look at the amount of money they had invested into media, when the new CEO came in, the concern was how fragmented the market was. If you look at how one of our competitors who recently divested their media business, it was very different to the way we did it.”
Ruiz
Ruiz believes that through One Equity Partners, Ericsson is able to be a part of the consolidation process.
The business brings together the old Tandberg Television, alongside Aspex, Azuki Systems, Envivio, Fabrix, HyCGroup and Microsoft Mediaroom. It currently serves over 900 cable, satellite, telecom service providers and broadcasters around the world
MediaKind will be headed Ruiz with Arun Bhikshesvaran, Chief Marketing Officer and Alex Borland, SVP EMEA Sales.
