Tennis star Coco Gauff featured in Team Whistle's video series ‘No Days Off.’
Photo: Team WhistleTeam Whistle, a digital media company known for its sports and entertainment programming on social platforms, has acquired the marketing firm Tiny Horse LLC, partly to capture more business from intensely competitive video streaming services.
More than three-quarters of Tiny Horse’s revenue has come from marketing work on behalf of streaming services, the company said. Its streaming clients include Amazon. com Inc., AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia and Netflix Inc.
Team Whistle will pay $30 million for Tiny Horse, mostly in the form of equity shares, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Whistle Sports Inc., which does business as Team Whistle, has raised more than $100 million since its formation in 2014. Its shareholders include Discovery Inc., Snap Inc. and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo LLC.
Tiny Horse will let the company pitch advertisers on deals that include brand marketing and performance-driven customer acquisition, said Michael Cohen, president of Team Whistle. “It will give us the ability to sell larger, more comprehensive packages,” he said.
Whistle’s acquisition of Tiny Horse also comes as the competition among streaming video services continues to heat up.
Netflix spent more than $500 million on marketing in the first quarter of 2020, according to its recent earnings report. Entertainment giants such as WarnerMedia, which will debut its HBO Max streaming service next week, and Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, which is rolling out its Peacock service, are expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing those services as well.
Tiny Horse also has an ad-sales unit focused on helping media companies sell streaming ads, which will boost Whistle’s ability to sell its own streaming ad inventory on platforms where it distributes its own streaming channel WhistleTV, said Mr. Cohen.
With the Tiny Horse acquisition, Team Whistle expects to more than double its revenue this year to exceed $100 million, said Mr. Cohen. The company is on track to be profitable for the 2020 calendar year, he said.
Tiny Horse is Team Whistle’s third acquisition in the last 15 months, following mobile video startup Vertical Networks, which was backed byElisabeth Murdoch and Snap, and the studio New Form, originally backed by Discovery and Hollywood producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
Ms. Murdoch is the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, which publishes The Wall Street Journal.
Write to Sahil Patel at sahil.patel@wsj.com
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May 21, 2020 at 05:00PM
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