Accelerating iMedia’s Growth in Online and OTT Media Commerce Services

iMedia Brands, announced that on July 30, 2021, the Company closed on the acquisition of Synacor’s Portal and Advertising business segment. Financial terms were not disclosed.

This acquisition is another example of iMedia’s strategy to leverage its interactive video expertise and national television promotional power, as well as its merchandising, customer solutions and fulfillment capabilities, to build unique media commerce services that the Company believes will accelerate its timeline to become the leading single-source partner to advertisers seeking to use interactive video to drive growth in the online and OTT ecosystems. In 2019, iMedia acquired Float Left, a leader in building and managing OTT applications and services for media companies across all major OTT and CTV devices, including Roku, Amazon Firestick, Apple TV and Samsung Smart TVs.

Synacor Portal and Advertising, which iMedia has renamed to Media Commerce Services (MCS), creates and manages end-to-end, white-label digital home-page platforms for domestic multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and internet service providers (ISPs). MCS monetizes these platforms with advertising and shares the advertising revenue with the respective publisher. MCS also offers various advertising solutions to additional online publishers, which includes MCS’s proprietary monetization platform that unifies supply-side-platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) and manages online publishers’ advertising sales operations.

iMedia expects this transaction to be accretive and expects MCS to generate at least $40 million in profitable revenue over the next twelve months. iMedia will be focused on competing for share in both the emerging $9+ billion OTT advertising marketplace, as well as the $200+ billion online advertising marketplace, against other digital services companies like Squarespace, Shopify and GoDaddy.

Commenting on this acquisition, Tim Peterman, CEO of iMedia, said: “The management team we are acquiring is strong and their advertising technology services are compelling. We know their MVPD and ISP customers well and are excited about the growth possibilities of empowering this team to leverage iMedia’s assets to create differentiated service offerings. I want to thank Synacor’s CEO, Himesh Bhise, for his partnership in completing this transaction and look forward to continued product partnerships with Synacor in the future.”

“iMedia will be a good fit for our talented Portal and Advertising team, and the combination will be beneficial for our MVPD, ISP and Publisher customers,” said Synacor CEO Himesh Bhise. “Synacor is now a pure-play, cloud-oriented software company, even more focused on growing and investing in our high-performance Cloud ID Identity Management and Zimbra Collaboration platforms.”