LiveUniverse rumored to purchase video site Revver
Online entertainment network LiveUniverse has purchased struggling video site Revver, according to NewTeeVee.
The purchase price was substantially more than the $500,000 to $1.5 million Revver was supposedly asking for, says NewTeeVee’s unnamed source, but it was also under $5 million. Revver’s staff will continue to work under the new ownership.
The deal isn’t a huge surprise — more than a month ago, Contentinople reported that it was in the works, and since then, plenty of other blogs have reported their share of Revver-related rumors. When the rumors started, a Revver spokesperson said: “We’re constantly pursuing content and business partnerships, and that activity seems to invariably generate acquisition conversations and rumors. … If we commented on all the rumors, we wouldn’t have time to focus on our core business.”
Los Angeles-based LiveUniverse is run by former MySpace exec Brad Greenspan. The company owns LiveVideo, and apparently wants to add Revver to its network.
Revver, meanwhile, has been going through some shake ups, with chief executive Steven Starr stepping down last June, following the departure of cofounders Ian Clarke and Oliver Luckett in December 2006. The company appears to have suffered from the same problems afflicting plenty of other video sites: Difficulty making money from its content, as well as competition from video giant YouTube.
In the past two years, Revver raised around $13 million from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, Draper Richards and William Randolph Hearst III.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.