Espresso Education (EE) have announced that they are buying Channel 4 Learning’s (C4L) education rights business. The specific details of the deal were not disclosed but it’s known that the transaction was done with EE shares. When the deal is completed EE’s major shareholders will include C4, ITV and Beringea Private Equity.
What does this deal mean? Essentially, it will see EE take over C4’s main education product ClipBank with over 800 hours of digital content. ClipBank, currently sold on DVD, will move online with the transition happening in two stages. An interim transition will occur in 100 days with the total online conversion scheduled to be completed within 200 days. ClipBank’s core audience is primary schools, but EE will now extend this to secondary schools and possibly even FE colleges.
As part of the deal, EE will have a ‘licence agreement for the exclusive commercial exploitation of C4’s existing and future schools’ television programmes, where Channel 4 has the right’. This could be a sizeable chunk of content given that Janey Walker’s team will spend £75m on commissioning educational content this year.
To date, EE’s main competitor has been Pearson’s Knowledge Box, although this seems to be going through a transition from a content focus to a ‘learning system’. Ironically, one of the companies KnowledgeBox lists as offering an ‘unrivalled choice of the best software’ is C4.
Delivery to schools for EE’s products is online and so the issue of delivery via learning platforms will be an important one. EE’s purchase of Netmedia Education certainly gives it an advantage as Netmedia is one of the ten accredited suppliers on BECTA’s Learning Platform Services Framework. Obviously ClipBank and all the EE products will have to work on other platforms and the company is already well advanced in terms of developing distribution to handhelds and other delivery devices like Xbox and PlayStation. It will be interesting to see if these learning platforms might also allow EE to extend ClipBank into homes and possibly even the homework/tutoring market. EE already has some distribution into the home market via Virgin Media’s Broadband Extras package.
International opportunities will also be something EE looks at and we suspect that markets like the US and Australia will be high on the list, particularly given that EE and Netmedia are also channel partners for Australian company Editure.
www.beringea.com
www.editure.com
www.espresso.co.uk
www.uk.knowledgebox.com
www.virginmedia.com/broadbandextras
