The IPTV market is forecasted to grow nicely for the foreseeable future and one company in the space who has recently gone public is Espial (News - Alert). As a pure-play provider of IPTV solutions Espial may be positioned nicely to take advantage of the growth in this area.
On Friday, Espial completed its IPO, issuing 3,571,000 common shares at a price of $7.00 per share, or roughly $25.0 million. The company plans to use the monies to expand its rapidly growing IPTV (News - Alert) middleware business.
In order to learn more about Espial’s IPO I contacted Brian Mahony the VP of Marketing at the company to get his feedback. Here is the ensuing mini-interview.
Q. Why did you decide to go public?
A. We decided some time ago that this would be the best option for growth financing.
Q. What was the market's perception of your offering?
A. The stock was up 12% in Friday's first day of trading, so it looks positive.
Q. What will the IPO enable your company to do?
A. According to the Prospectus, the funds will be used to improve the breadth and depth of our products and to allow us to invest in sales, marketing, and operations to support our growth.
Q. Where will Espial be in 3, 5 years?
A. I can't predict where Espial will be in 3 or 5 years, but if we at least grow with the IPTV market (growing at about 90% CAGR according to market research firm iSuppli) we should be doing fine. We also want to maintain our status as one of the leading middleware companies in all our major markets (Asia, Americas, EMEA)
Q. What is the future of IPTV?
A. The future of IPTV is about more than TV but other interactive applications and video-related services. IPTV will take advantage of the unique service, technology, and financial advantages of IP technology to provide a more enhanced service for subscribers and a more cost-effective, scalable, and revenue-generating platform for operators
Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC (News - Alert) (News - Alert). In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended VoIPevent, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo.
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) | X |
IPTV delivers a digital television service to subscribers
via the Internet Protocol over a broadband connection....more |
Middleware | X |
Application Service Programs such as Microsoft .NET platform use an infrastructure of components based on a client-server computing/network architecture with enhanced use of internet services called m...more |