TalkTalk Group acquires Blinkbox from Tesco

Thursday, January 8th, 2015
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TalkTalk Group acquires Blinkbox Movies and Tesco Broadband base

TalkTalk has acquired the blinkbox Movies business (“blinkbox”) and the Tesco broadband and fixed line voice base from Tesco Plc. The assets have been acquired free of debt and as a single transaction for cash.

blinkbox is one of the leading on-demand providers of pay content in the UK and works across multiple platforms and devices – both inside and outside the home. blinkbox’s established technical expertise in multi-platform, multi-device content delivery and incremental content relationships are highly complementary to TalkTalk’s existing strategy of being the best value for money TV provider in the UK, offering customers flexible access to the widest range of free and paid for content. TalkTalk TV is already the fastest growing TV platform in the UK with over 1.2 million customers and blinkbox will help accelerate the development of our platform by delivering a number of key initiatives significantly faster, such as offering a TV app to customers for in and out of home access to paid-for content across a range of devices.

The integration of blinkbox with our existing TV business is expected to begin immediately with the benefits of restructuring the combined platform and revenue synergies expected to flow from the end of calendar 2015. We are pleased that Adrian Letts, blinkbox CEO and co-founder will join TalkTalk as Managing Director for TV and report to Tristia Harrison, Managing Director of our consumer business.

As part of the same transaction we have also acquired Tesco’s broadband and voice base (c75,000 broadband and c20,000 voice households) which will enable us to further leverage the superior scale and economics of our national network. As with the recent acquisition of the Virgin Media National base, customers will be transferred across to the TalkTalk network over the coming months.

Dido Harding, Chief Executive of TalkTalk commented: “Since launch TalkTalk TV has demonstrated its popularity with value-seeking customers to become the UK’s fastest growing TV service. We are excited about the opportunity that blinkbox’s platform and technology expertise bring, and which will significantly accelerate the development of our TV platform. The purchase of Tesco’s broadband base is another example of TalkTalk leveraging its national network to grow faster. We are excited about the future of quad-play – fixed phone and broadband, TV and mobile – and this acquisition will help to further drive home our value for money advantage.”