Thomson To Acquire Canopus

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.