LONDON – He told us he would buy companies – and today that guidance came to pass. Charlie Muirhead’s Rightster is taking a big step to consolidate the video ecosystem by buying two of its biggest protagonists.
Eight months after going public to raise £22.4m, the firm is acquiring viral video management firm Viral Spiral for up to £4.1m ($7m) and is proposing to buy multi-channel network (MCN) Base79 for up to £50m ($85m).
Rightster lets content owners upload videos once for distribution and monetization through several platforms. The additions give it much more heft. But it is having to raise another £42m by floating 75m new shares to finance part of the deals.
Former YouTube EMEA partnerships boss Patrick Walker, now at Base 79, will join Rightster, bringing YouTube co-founder Chad Hurdley on to the Rightster advisory committee through an investment.
In November, Rightster CEO Muirhead told Beet.TV he wanted to buy “companies that would grow our customer base, where it grows our footprint, where we have a gap in our expertise, and anything we can acquire that would accelerate our monetization”.
