Cisco buys Arroyo — a back-end TiVo — and is now really in your living-room
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San Jose router giant Cisco has acquired Arroyo for $92 million, to help Cisco serve videos to you in your home. It is the latest in a surge of investments by Cisco to control access to your living-room video viewing.
We’ve written about Arroyo several times before: It is kind of like a giant TiVo located in the cable operator’s network, as opposed to being in the home — effectively giving consumers access to thousands of hours of programming without needing to schedule recording.
The two main guys leading Cisco’s ruckus in the living-room are pictured below. They are Ned Hooper, who is head of Cisco’s biz dev, at left, and his right-hand man, Charles Carmel, standing in back. (Courtesy of Merc photographer Karen Borchers, who took the photo back in June, when we wrote this post. and linked to a bigger story about the Cisco campaign to takeover your living-room).
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| Cisco’s Ned Hooper, Charles Carmel |
Arroyo has raised around $27 million in VC funding from firms like Foundation Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital, DCM-Doll Capital Management, Matrix Partners and Time Warner Investments. Here is the Mercury News story about the today’s Arroyo deal and what it means.
We mentioned back in July that Cisco was looking at the Arroyo, once Motorola snapped up a related video server company, Broadbus. Mountain View’s Kasenna, which raised $15 million more than two years ago, is also offering a similar technology.
Update: There’s a snap analysis in comments, about how much investors made on this deal.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
