KKR Firm Emerald Media Picks Up Stake in Yupp TV for $50Mn

Hyderabad: Emerald Media, a Pan-Asian platform promoted by US private equity (PE) major KKR, will acquire stake in Yupp TV. Emerald Media on Monday announced its decision to invest $50 million to buy a significant minority stake in YuppTV, according to a release from KKR. Yupp TV is promoted by Hyderabad-based Uday Reddy and Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu recently roped in as a brand ambassador.

Yupp TV is one of the world’s leading over-the-top (OTT) video platforms for South Asian content offering live TV, catch-up TV and movies on-demand in 14 languages across the globe. Global investment firm KKR is implementing its expansion plan for the media and entertainment sectors.

The growth capital will enable YuppTV to further its global footprint, expand its content library through original productions and acquisitions, and rapidly grow its paid subscriber base.

Uday Reddy, Promoter and CEO of YuppTV, said, “We couldn’t ask for a stronger partner than Emerald Media. YuppTV is a content distribution platform with a strong consumer connection, and Emerald Media has global media relationships. We hope to leverage their relationships and existing assets Endemol, OML, Fluence and Graphic India to create original programming and make this platform a next generation distribution and content powerhouse.”

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, YuppTV enjoys a wide reach of over 400 million households across the world. With more than 5 million monthly visitors accessing YuppTV across 27 integrated devices with a peak monthly traffic of 20 million YuppTV has been setting records across the OTT industry.

Rajesh Kamat, Managing Director of Emerald Media, said, “Emerald Media believes in driving change and value-creation by providing a distinctive combination of capital, domain knowledge and management bandwidth. The world is moving from traditional consumption to multiscreen delivery mediums. YuppTV provides a unique combination of technology, strong content relationships and revenues of scale and will be an anchor to our vision of building a new age media company.”

YuppTV offers over 250 South Asian TV channels, 5000 movies and 100 TV shows to worldwide audiences, with a focus on the USA, UK, Middle East, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean. YuppTV continues to revolutionize the way TV and movies are viewed across the world with over 25,000 hours of entertainment content catalogued in its library, as well as nearly 5,000 hours of new on-demand content added to the YuppTV platform every day.

YuppTV has gained considerable popularity in India having recently launched in the market. With an initial focus on South India, the company has gradually expanded to the rest of the country. It has also recently implemented advanced analytics-based real-time recommendations on Live TV, to make content more discoverable.

Paul Aiello, Managing Director of Emerald Media, added, “Uday and his team have created an exceptional online video platform with a loyal subscriber base that realizes the huge potential of the global Indian diaspora. Our investment and relationship will enable YuppTV to further their strong leadership position in the rapidly growing OTT space.”

Rajesh Kamat and Paul Aiello are promoters of Emerald Media. KKR has committed up to $300mm from its KKR Asian Fund II for the media and entertainment segments. The platform primarily focuses on providing growth capital to media, entertainment and digital media companies.

In September 2015, YuppTV had raised its Series A round of funding from Poarch Creek Indian Tribe of Alabama. YuppTV has had over 10 million mobile app downloads, in addition to 50 million pre-installs on Samsung TVs worldwide and 300,000+ downloads on LG Smart TV, making it one of the most downloaded Smart TV Apps. The YuppTV app is also the second most popular app in Android Playstore in India (Entertainment) and the only South Asian app available on PS3™ & PS4™. In addition, YuppTV has launched its exclusive on-demand movie streaming service, YuppFlix, which is backed by an extensive library of more than 5000+ movies across various languages.

Rajesh Kamat and Paul Aiello are promoters of Emerald Media. KKR has committed up to $300mm from its KKR Asian Fund II for the media and entertainment segments. The platform primarily focuses on providing growth capital to media, entertainment and digital media companies. The platform looks to invest approximately $15-75mn per investment to acquire control or significant minority positions in growing public and private media companies.