LONDON — It’s barely a week since video distribution and monetization service Rightster became that rare beast – a technology floatation on London’s stock markets. But CEO Charlie Muirhead, whose company raised £22.4 million ($36 million), tells Beet.TV he is already talking with companies he wants to buy to grow his video business further.
“We’re in discussion with a small number of companies already that are potential acquisitions,” Muirhead says. “They are in four different spaces: 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”.
Rightster lets content owners upload videos once for distribution and monetization through several platforms. With 750 partner content outlets and 6,500 publishers, Muirhead claims to be the first YouTube multi-channel network (MCN) partner to IPO – a move it pulled to fund a platform upgrade and debt pay-downs as well as to fuel acquisitions. But he rejects the suggestion an MCN is too heavily reliant on YouTube.
Rightster’s filing document revealed it to be loss-making on fast-growing revenue as costs increase. By going public, Muirhead is fuelling development in what is a fast-growing, big-opportunity sector – monthly average video views via Rightster are up more than sevenfold from last year to 160 million, he claims.
This video was recorded at the Beet.TV programmatic video leadership summit sponsored by Videology, hosted by Xaxis at the London offices of GroupM.