Avid is being acquired by an affiliate of STG in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.4 billion, inclusive of Avid’s net debt. Jeff Rosica, Avid President and CEO, said STG’s expertise in the technology sector and significant financial resources will help accelerate the company’s strategic vision. The acquisition is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2023, subject to Avid stockholder and regulatory approvals. Upon completion of the transaction, Avid will become a privately-held company, and its common stock will no longer be traded on Nasdaq.
Electric Sheep, a UK-based AI tech startup in visual effects (VFX), has announced the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of half a million dollars, led by Dasein Capital (U.S.), and backed by Spatial Capital (U.S.) and Look AI Ventures (Czech Republic). Electric Sheep is pioneering a solution to automate flawless background removal for TV and film. Known as rotoscoping, the process is essential before adding special effects. Currently, the only way to deliver the detail needed for the big screen is to manually cut around foregrounds frame-by-frame, which takes around six hours for one second of footage and costs the industry over $1.5 billion per year. Electric Sheep’s cloud-native solution, Spotlight, is 360x faster, processing one second of footage in less than a minute.
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Triton Digital has announced a data integration that will see YouTube views of podcast episodes integrated into TritonPodcast Metrics, one of the first IAB-certified podcast measurement services to do so. Publishers using Podcast Metrics will be able to compare podcast downloads and views of their programming on YouTube within the interface and consolidate video metrics from a variety of programs. A Podcast Metrics Demos+ survey, conducted by Triton Digital and Signal Hill Insights, found 28% of monthly podcast listeners name YouTube as the platform they use most often to consume podcasts.
