Biz news: Unitel sells out
mainUNITEL GmbH & Co. KG, the leading producer and distributor of televised classical music, has sold its backlist and Classica channel to Canadian giant Stingray.
The deal is worth a reported $15 million.
Stingray wins worldwide rights to a catalogue of 1,500 titles and 2,000 hours of premium content produced and owned by Unitel.
A tiny amount by current standards.
Sloppy reporting. The usage rights for the Unitel catalogue is contracted for a limited period of 11 years for 8 mio US $.
The Classica TV platform is sold for 7 mio US $.
Apparently those rights are not exclusive, so Unitel keeps full distribution rights for their back catalogue themselves as well apparently. At least that’s what I read out of the statement, since no exclusivity is mentioned.
What is Stingray? We subscribe to 4 classical music channels through Orange.fr. but Brava recently became Stingray Brava and now shows mainly short clips – gone are the operas. Classica was good – showing entire operas and concerts. If they have also been swallowed up by Stingray that will be a huge loss, and only leave Mezzo & Mezzo HD showing full-length opera, concerts & ballet.
If any reader of Slipped Disc can enlighten me I’d be very grateful.
Stingray have now (2018) bought out Unitel Classica as well. There is no longer a schedule online. They are not on Twitter. Today they were supposed to be showing the opera Zelmira. Instead they broadcast a very old black and white Karajan concert. They then followed it with another old concert, no way of knowing what. Meanwhile the screen still reads Zelmira and Orange.Fr, the provider, has Zelmira announced on its website.
Stingray appear answerable to no one. The only option for the unhappy consumer is to cancel the subscription. A big loss for us classical music fans.