MobiTV, a provider of internet-video delivery services, announced that it closed over $50 million in new funding from existing investors Oak Investment Partners and Ally Financial and new investor Cedar Grove Partners.
The company said it will use the investment to accelerate its international footprint and continue to build out its MobiTV Connect platform, which provides a white-label hosting streaming solution for small and midsize pay-TV operators.
MobiTV has raised over $200 million over the course of the its 20-year life span, per Crunchbase. That includes a $21 million round in February 2017 from Ally Bank and Oak Investment Partners.
MobiTV first launched the MobiTV Connect platform in 2016 and says it now counts 90 cable and telco operators as customers, including Citizens Fiber, Windstream, and EPB. The company also has a partnership with the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) as an app-based pay-TV video solution to NCTC members.
The MobiTV Connect platform has been granted hosted-streaming delivery rights for more than 350 networks from programmers including Disney and ESPN Media Networks, Showtime, Viacom, A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Crown Media Family Networks, and C-SPAN. (MobiTV’s operator customers must separately negotiate carriage deals with the programmers.) The solution doesn’t include local TV stations, but the company says it can work with operator customers to integrate local stations into a MobiTV Connect-powered offering.
“We believe in MobiTV’s superior consumer experience and know that being the only true [TV as a service] commercially deployed solution in North America has differentiated their positioning in the marketplace,” Bandel Carano, managing partner, Oak Investment Partners, said in a statement.
Based in Emeryville, Calif., MobiTV was founded in 1999 originally as a direct-to-consumer brand delivering video to mobile devices, initially through partnerships including with Sprint.