Edgeware to acquire leading subtitling supplier Cavena Image Products AB

Edgeware has today announced that it is to acquire Swedish subtitling expert Cavena Image Products AB. The deal broadens Edgeware's offering to broadcasters and content owners by adding subtitling automation to its origin solution.

Cavena has successfully been supplying solutions to the broadcasting market for more than 10 years and is a market leader in the area of subtitling. Cavena's customers include Sky, Canal+ and HBO Asia. Integrating subtitling technology into Edgeware's origin solution will enable broadcasters to build a higher-value origin system that can enable personalized advertising, support any type of device, and now automate the subtitling process. Our growing numbers of broadcaster customers are demanding the highest quality from their OTT services. We already work alongside Cavena's systems in some of our largest deployments, such as myTV SUPER in Hong Kong, said Karl Thed en, CEO at Edgeware, so it makes sense for us to offer a more integrated solution to those broadcasters, and to further enhance our origin solution, which is generating a lot of interest. It also gives us the opportunity to introduce our respective technologies to each other's customers.

Cavena's technology delivers high quality subtitles across any screen format, to any client and in any character set. It uses Optical Character Recognition to convert subtitles from image to text formats, which provide a much higher quality experience for OTT viewers. The system can also transcode different subtitle formats within milliseconds, scaling to support hundreds of channels. The Cavena-generated text is then passed on to Edgeware's TV Repackager system, to create glitch-free OTT content. The combined solution supports any language, including more complex Asian character sets.

Subtitling is an important part of today's TV services, enhancing the accessibility of valuable content, said Henrik Moberg, managing director at Cavena Image. As more TV is watched online, our customers and prospects need to optimise subtitling to offer a high quality OTT experience. Working with Edgeware will allow us to integrate our technology into a broader origin solution that has been purpose-built for today's online TV delivery.

Edgeware will acquire 100% of the shares in Cavena Image Products AB, for 8 million SEK on a cash and debt free basis. The acquisition will only have a minor impact on Edgeware's 2019 forecasted revenues and profitability but will have more strategic impact over the longer term, enabling Edgeware to offer a broader set of products into broadcasters and content owners OTT service. Edgeware also expects to benefit from some operational synergies between the two companies, which are both based in Stockholm, Sweden.

The deal is expected to close during Q1 2019. More information will be provided in connection with the presentation of the year-end report 2018, February 1, 2019.

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