By
Rebecca Gibson |
KVH Industries has completed a US$24 million acquisition of Headland Media, as part of its strategy to extend its maritime broadband services to include delivering premium content to vessels.
“We’ve captured a leading market share in the maritime very small aperture terminal (Vsat) market for one-to-one connectivity, and are now rolling out a new, highly efficient, low-cost multicasting capability that we believe will create significant growth opportunities for Headland Media’s content by eliminating the time and cost of physically delivering DVDs to vessels,” said Martin Kits van Heyningen, KVH’s chief executive officer.
KVH will use its Integrated CommBox Modem to distribute data onboard vessels and provide passengers and crew with access to Headland Media’s broad range of television shows, premium movies, sports, news and music channels. The company will also bring its internet protocol television technology to the maritime market, delivering Headland Media’s content over the mini- Vsat broadband network.
Kits van Heyningen added: “We see this acquisition as a great start to KVH’s new initiative to bring our customers the same high-quality multimedia content they enjoy onshore, but have usually been unable to receive over their maritime satellite service because of either prohibitively high costs or protocol blocking associated with service providers’ fair use policies.”