The sum? A whopping $1.58 billion.
Is Disney going into LOL eSports streaming soon? Disney has announced majority acquisition of BAMTech, the streaming technology partner of Riot Games. BAMTech is the streaming-video company founded by Major League Baseball.
According to Dot Esports, Disney will be forking a cool $1.58 billion to acquire an additional 42% stake in BAMTech from its parent company, increasing its total stake in the tech firm to 75%.
In timely fashion, Disney also announced that it will launch an ESPN video streaming service in early 2018, with plans of a Disney streaming platform in the following year. The mass media and entertainment megacorp will also be dropping its distribution deal with streaming powerhouse Netflix from 2019 onwards. That means that new Disney flicks in 2019 will be exclusives on their own streaming platform.
“This acquisition and the launch of our direct-to-consumer services mark an entirely new growth strategy for the company, one that takes advantage of the incredible opportunity that changing technology provides us to leverage the strength of our great brands,” said the Chairman and CEO of Disney, Robert Iger.
“We’re very proud of the content distribution innovations driven by MLBAM and BAMTech over the past 15 years. Major League Baseball will continue to work with Disney and ESPN to further grow BAMTech as it breaks new ground in technologies for consumers to access entertainment and sports programming,” added by Commissioner of Baseball, Robert Manfred, Jr.
