Amazon acquires Net Insight’s consumer streaming business for £28m

Net Insight has sold its Sye business to Amazon for approximately SEK 350m (£28m/€33m) in cash.

The deal for the consumer streaming business was initially announced on 17 December and then finalised on 3 January.

The Sye technology is said to solve “fundamental issues for B2C streaming distribution”, a function that Amazon offers through its Prime Video service.

Amazon has previously deployed Sye in some of its live-streaming services. It is not clear whether it has been used on the output of any of the live sports it currently holds the rights to, which includes football and tennis.

With the close of this transaction, 100% of the shares in the wholly-owned Sye business subsidiary, which holds all relevant IPRs, contracts and about 30 employees and consultants have been transferred to Amazon.

The estimated net profit of the transaction will be some SEK 200 million in the first quarter of 2020.

In a statement, Net Insight said that the divestment will allow the company to increase focus and investments in its core B2B Media Networks business area and competencies gained while developing and launching Sye.  These include virtualized software and cloud-based technology, internet-based transport, remote or distributed production and cloud networking solutions.