Haivision Acquires KulaByte and MontiVision

"All market segments now demand access to a high-quality live and on-demand HD media experience regardless of network or platform," said Mirko Wicha, President and CEO of Haivision Network Video. "With KulaByte and MontiVision, Haivision can now deliver end-to-end rich media solutions for both inside and outside the enterprise firewall. The new division is also focused on addressing the challenges of effective social media networks for the enterprise."

KulaByte Corporation is a technology leader in providing live software-based encoding and transcoding technologies. KulaByte's H.264 encoding software and systems deliver the highest quality Internet streaming of HD content to Flash® RTMP and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for the iPhone®/iPad® and other platforms. KulaByte's HyperStream is one of the world's first live cloud-based video transcoding services. It's capable of transforming live video source streams into all of the many formats and data rates required to distribute live video via the Internet to every screen, regardless of device, player, screen size, or bandwidth. HyperStream reduces the cost and complexity of live video streaming by using the cloud to transcode source streams into multiple formats and bit rates needed for diverse media distribution. HyperStream is available as a cloud-based service, a managed server within the cloud, or a stand-alone server appliance.

KulaByte, founded in 2004, has an extensive customer list across many market segments, including over-the–top (OTT) broadcast, HD Internet TV, live church streaming, education, corporate event broadcasting, live sporting event streaming, and military and defense applications. KulaByte encoders and cloud transcoders have recently been used to broadcast the Masters golf tournament to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

MontiVision Imaging Technologies, founded in 2003 and a partner in the development of Kulabyte products, is an advanced development company focused on delivering technologies for video acquisition, machine vision, surveillance, and medical imaging applications. The MontiVision Development Kit provides a development environment allowing high-performance media solutions to be built rapidly. MontiVision boasts an extensive client list including vertical market solutions providers and top education and research facilities globally.

KulaByte and MontiVision now form Haivision's Internet Media Division. The division is focused on developing technologies to deliver OTT media and to power enterprise social media networks. Haivision has appointed Chafye Nemri as Executive Vice President of this new division and KulaByte CEO Peter Forman as Vice President of Internet Media, responsible for developing the division's cloud services. Key initiatives of the division will enable the creation, distribution, and management of media assets for organizations regardless of user location.

"Haivision is unique in the IP video industry in that we have been profitable for many years, experienced more than 50-percent growth for the last five years, and we continue to increase our market share dramatically — all without venture capital investment," continued Wicha. "Our executive management group is the best in the industry with an amazing track record, and together with a dedicated and driven team of more than 150 people, we expect to surpass revenues of $50 million next year."