Broadcast-streaming. Viacom is acquiring AwesomenessTV, reportedly for just $25M (and some debt) from NBCUniversal, Verizon, and Hearst. Verizon bought its stake 2 years ago at a $650M valuation. Two years before that, Hearst paid $81.25m for a 25% stake which gave the company a valuation of $325m. That was nearly triple what DreamWorks had paid for the teen-oriented YouTube multi-channel network the previous year. Viacom is acquiring the youth-media company from NBCUniversal (51% stake), Verizon, and Hearst (24.5% each) for a knock-down price which, to say the least, signals a softer market for (at least some) online media companies. AwesomenessTV (ATV) has a distribution footprint that spans free and subscription VoD platforms. It reaches a claimed 158m unique users with some 300m monthly views. It has production studio with a library of more than 200 hours of long-form TV series and feature films. It will now be integrated into Viacom Digital Studios and gives the opportunity to link with Nickelodeon and MTV. The price of the Viacom deal – and the fact that NBCUniversal, Verizon and Hearst have wanted to sell – underlines the challenge of monetising video streaming especially for the prized “Generation Z” YouTube demographic. If you’re looking for clues, the deal follows this month’s shutdown of Verizon’s go90 streaming service on which Verizon had been working with ATV to develop short-form programming. Some sources said “the joint ownership structure of the company was not working because of conflicting priorities”. Hearst – whose major earners across the past 30 years have shifted sequentially from newspapers to magazines to TV to B2B data – is now making profits of more than $1.1bn and certainly gets many of its investments right, especially when it teams up with savvy partners. Look how well it has paid off for Hearst to be partnering Disney in ESPN, A+E, History Channel et al. It has similar high hopes for its collaboration with Verizon which includes the Complex Networks’ stable of brands which together generate over 500m videos views a month.” Well, AwesomenessTV has been a tiny bump in the long road to dominate post-TV millennial audiences. The investment that has been talked up until quite recently by Hearst executives has proved to be something other than, well, awesome.
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Viacom snaps up AwesomenessTV
