Stingray Digital
 |
|
| Public | |
| Traded as | |
| Industry | Media |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Headquarters | Montreal, Quebec |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Eric Boyko (President, CEO & founder) |
| Revenue |
 US$ 71 million (2015)
|
|
Number of employees
|
250 (2015) |
| Website | www |
Stingray Digital Group is a publicly traded Canadian media and entertainment company based in Montreal, Quebec, with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Israel, Australia and South Korea. The company broadcasts music and video content on platforms including cable and satellite television, IPTV, Internet, mobile devices and game consoles, and develops customized audio and digital services for retailers, hotels and other commercial clients.
Stingray Digital was founded in May 2007 by Eric Boyko and Alexandre Taillefer, in partnership with Telesystem, following the purchase of karaoke company Soundchoice for $6 million. This gave them a catalogue of karaoke songs and a karaoke channel, allowing them to create The Karaoke Channel (now known as Stingray Karaoke). Later that year, the company acquired cable TV commercial-free music service Galaxie from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for $65 million, renaming it Stingray Music. Taillefer exited the company in 2010.
In May 2015, Stingray raised $140 million in its initial public offering. The sale gave the firm a market value of $296 million. It began trading on the on June 3, 2015, under the ticker RAY. Novacap sold most of its stake in the company after the IPO.
In 2014, Stingray launched the Stingray Music mobile app. In 2015, the service began connecting listeners to over 1,500 Vibes channels of music from a variety of genres. The service is a radio-style app aimed at passive listeners, without the option to listen to specific tracks on demand. The listeners can customize station to specific genres by applying up to three different filters from a list of options. The number of Vibes channels is expected to grow to 3,000 by the end of 2016.
Between 2008 and 2015, Stingray's annual revenue grew from $7.1 million to $71 million CAD. By 2011, Stingray had amassed the world's largest catalogue of licensed karaoke songs for the Internet. As of October 2015, Stingray reaches an estimated 135 million pay television subscribers in 127 countries, and provides music playlists for 74,000 stores in Canada, including chain stores Reitmans and Subway.
Stingray properties include:
Music Choice, which launched in 1991, is owned by Microsoft, Arris, Sony Corp. of America, EMI Music Publishing, Time Warner, Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications. Music Choice is in 72 million American households. The company filed the lawsuit against Stingray Digital in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in June 2016 over patent infringement. The patents in dispute are U.S. Patent Nos. 8,769,602, 9,357,245, 7,320,025 and 9,351,045 pertaining to the on screen formatting of Stingray Digital's channels. Stingray countersued Music Choice on August 29, 2016 calling it a "smear campaign".
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Wikipedia