ARC buys U.S. multimedia IP developer Alarity in $4M deal
By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- EDN, September 24, 2007
England-based configurable media subsystems and CPU/DSP processors developer ARC International plc today announced that it has acquired privately held multimedia intellectual property (IP) developer Alarity Corp. in a deal valued at around $4 million (2 million British pounds.)
According to ARC, an additional consideration of $1.81 million (900,000 British pounds) will be paid over two and half years based upon completion of certain performance targets.
Headquartered in New Jersey, Alarity has an R&D team of close to 40 personnel based in St. Petersburg, Russia, specializing in codec software, firmware and advanced multimedia architectures. ARC's acquisition includes all of Alarity's employees and its library of optimized solutions for standard definition (SD) and HD video, hi-fidelity audio, imaging, DSP and information security applications.
In a statement released today, ARC said that the acquisition provide Alarity's full set of resources to a "broader number of ARC customers and prospects, enhance ARC's ongoing multimedia product development efforts, and bolster its customer-specific engineering capabilities."
Alarity's engineers focus in HD video and image processing, hi-fidelity audio algorithms, coding and compression, A/V pre- and post-processing, encryption, digital watermarking and digital rights management -- technologies which ARC said are essential to HD DVD, Blu-ray DVD, next-generation iPTV, and HDTV broadcast standards.
As part of the acquisition ARC said it has established a multimedia development center in St. Petersburg. Eugene Metlitski, co-founder and CTO of Alarity, will join ARC's office of the CTO. Felix Litvinsky, co-founder and CEO of Alarity, will join ARC as a VP of the company.
This is not the only major announcement to come from ARC in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the company announced that it had signed a new multi-year, royalty-bearing licensing agreement with industry-leading microprocessor maker Intel Corp. The financial terms of that deal have not been disclosed.
