SoftBank is at it again, this time around the company gobbled up DramaFever, a Korean online video subscription service.
DramaFever houses series and films from more than 70 broadcasters and studios across Asia, Europe and the Americas. The company also syndicates a portion of its library to Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. DramaFever claims to have a reach of approximately 20 million unique monthly viewers.
Nikesh Arora, vice chairman of SoftBank Corp. and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media, Inc. (SIMI), said SoftBank will help to lend additional scale to DramaFever’s five-year-old business.
“[Co-CEOs] Seung Bak and Suk Park have a proven business model in a dynamic industry, and we look forward to helping them bring their highly popular video content to an even larger global audience,” Arora said in a statement.
The latest content investment from SIMI comes less than two weeks after the SoftBank subsidiary announced a $250 million JV with Legendary, a media company working in film, TV, digital and comics. The investment will be geared toward exploiting Legendary’s intellectual property rights in China and India markets.
SoftBank last month bid $3.4 billion in a failed attempt to acquire US-based animation studio DreamWorks.
Since acquiring majority ownership of Sprint in 2013 SoftBank has made substantial changes including replacing CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure. Arora, former chief business officer at Google, was hired in July to help SoftBank, and by extension Sprint, through its “next stage of growth.”
