Advanced Television

Veritone to acquire Wazee Digital

August 14, 2018

Veritone has signed an agreement to acquire Wazee Digital, a provider of cloud-native video management and licensing services that enable rights holders to monetise and enrich their content. Veritone, the SaaS-based operating system for Artificial Intelligence (AI), will offer the Wazee Digital applications and services into the Media and Entertainment as well as Government markets, providing Veritone customers with the ability to drive expanded revenue opportunities from their existing video, still images and audio assets.

The consideration to be paid by Veritone in the transaction is $15 million, with such consideration being payable $7.5 million in cash and $7.5 million in Veritone common stock.  Wazee Digital, based in Denver, Colorado, had net revenues of over $19 million in 2017. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close by the end of August 2018.

“Wazee Digital has a dynamic content licensing and asset management business, one of the most comprehensive operational platforms for monetisation of digital media assets with a fantastic roster of blue-chip customers. And now, as a result of the recent integration between Wazee Digital’s asset management platform and Veritone’s operating system for Artificial Intelligence — aiWARE — joint customers can fully index, categorise, and package content Wazee Digital’s platform, resulting in unparalleled, additional revenue opportunities,” said Chad Steelberg, Veritone Founder & CEO.

Said Harris Morris, Wazee Chairman and CEO, added: “We’re extremely excited to leverage our best-in-class asset management and monetisation capabilities with Veritone’s unique cloud-based AI operating system. The combined solution will provide existing Wazee Digital customers such as  HBO, Bloomberg, Viacom, and FremantleMedia a proven, productised, and enterprise-grade solution to intelligently identify new ways to capitalise the value of their marquee content and ensure that content securely reaches its rightful audiences around the globe.” Added Chad Hamilton, the Vice President, Technology at FremantleMedia, “I am excited to see how our partnership with Wazee Digital benefits from the expertise and increased insight that Veritone enables through artificial intelligence. By incorporating AI into our cloud-based media asset management workflow, FremantleMedia will have the ability to extract more value from our assets.”

 

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