Advanced Television

Private equity firm acquires QuickPlay Media

July 9, 2012

QuickPlay Media, a provider of cloud-based infrastructure for premium media services, has completed the sale of a majority of its outstanding equity interests to investment funds affiliated with Madison Dearborn Partners LLC. Madison Dearborn, a Chicago-based private equity firm with significant expertise in helping to grow media and technology services companies, also has agreed to fund QuickPlay’s continued expansion. Madison Dearborn’s total investment will be approximately $100 million.

Madison Dearborn and QuickPlay’s employees will own substantially all of the eight-year-old company. A limited number of minority shareholders, including Toronto-based Difference Capital Inc. will remain part of the ownership.

“We are delighted to conclude a tremendously successful fiscal year with the announcement of Madison Dearborn as the new majority owner of QuickPlay,” said Wayne Purboo, CEO and founder, QuickPlay Media. “We are especially excited to be connected to a firm that shares our vision of creating high-quality, scalable and cost effective multiscreen services by moving pay TV and premium media infrastructure to the cloud.”

QuickPlay has pioneered the multiscreen entertainment experience, providing managed service solutions for some of the world’s largest communications and media companies, including AT&T U-verse, Bell, Research In Motion (RIM), Rogers Communications, Samsung, SIRIUS XM Radio, Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and Verizon.

In June 2011, QuickPlay acquired the network operations centre assets of FLO TV from Qualcomm as part of its US expansion, broadening its abilities for managing on-demand content and live TV coverage of major sporting and news events for customers worldwide. The company’s cloud-based OpenVideo platform currently manages more than 1.5 million content assets across more than 3,000 content providers, delivering video to more than 300 different device family profiles. QuickPlay has been recognised by Deloitte multiple times as one of the fastest growing companies in North America.

“QuickPlay is at the center of one of the most exciting and promising areas in the media and technology services industry, and we are very pleased to make this investment,” said Zaid Alsikafi, a managing director at Madison Dearborn Partners. “We have identified a number of growth opportunities for QuickPlay and we look forward to working with Wayne and the talented employees of QuickPlay to achieve them and enable QuickPlay to become a global leader in this space.”

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