Thomson announced today its plans to purchase Canopus, noting its
complimentary products will help round out the Thomson portfolio of
solutions for broadcast and professional audio-visual markets as well
as provide key technological solutions to improve existing and develop
new products.(Pictured Above: Marc Valentin, President of the Grass Valley business within Thomson and Hiroshi Yamada, chairman and CEO of Canopus shake hands.)
Today, Thomson purchased one-third of the Canopus shares in a private
transaction with Canopus chairman and CEO Hiroshi Yamada and will
present a public tender offer for the remaining shares tomorrow.
Assuming the transaction is approved an completed, Thomson plans to
keep the Canopus management in place, overseeing exisitng Canopus
products and helping to develop new ones.
“One of the things that led us to the decision to acquire Canopus is
the complimentary products and sales opportunities,” said Jeff Rosica,
Vice President, Worldwide Strategic Marketing & Business
Development for Grass Valley. “Their products will give us much greater
access to the video market and it has excellent R&D capabilities.
The other thing is brings important compression technologies and allow
us to leverage their CODECS in product lines across Thomson. From a
portfolio standpoint this was an obvious fit.”
Once the acquisition is finalized, which is expected by mid-January,
Thomson immediately plans to fully integrate the Canopus Edius NLE with
its own NewsEdit NLE to provide an end-to-end solution for digital news
production and extend its offerings into the post production market.
“We will invest quite a bit an leverage the Edius product line and our
portfolio in the post market. We think Canopus’ editing capabilities,
particularly in HD and HDV, and its performance of handling multiple
formats in the same timeline are very strong. And again their CODECS
are very impressive for the pro-AV market,” noted Rosica. “We believe
gaining access to the Canopus’ CODEC technology will be an advantage to
our customers. We’ve been extremely impressed with their HD and HDV
MPEG compression CODECS and we intend to implement them in our own
solutions.”
In addition to the immediate impact this acquisition will have on the
Thomson’s offerings in the broadcast and professional video market,
much of the decision to purchase Canopus was based on the company’s
underlying technologies.
“The digital media conversion products and the technology underlying
those to build additional product in the future and this IP-based video
distribution system for enterprise environments, are two of the key
elements of our broader pro-AV play that will be two key elements in
moving forward our future plans for the pro-AV market,” explained
Rosica.