Siemens buys Internet video software company Myrio

FRANKFURT: German engineering conglomerate Siemens has agreed to buy Myrio, a small U.S. Internet video software specialist to strengthen its consumer entertainment business, it said on Friday.

The companies declined to name the price of the acquisition of privately held Myrio, but Siemens sources said it was in the mid-double-digit millions of euros.

Myrio, which makes software and hardware for delivering television signals over the Internet and has 75 staff, has been a partner of Siemens for over a year, Siemens said in a statement.

A spokesman for Siemens Com, the company's telecoms unit, said Siemens aimed to bolster its position in the fast-growing home entertainment market, which it estimates will be worth 20 billion euros ($26 billion) globally by 2006.

Telecom operators are trying to expand into the market for delivering video and other entertainment to private homes via the Internet, as their traditional fixed-line voice telephony business slows.

Siemens, whose only consumer business is its loss-making mobile phones business, does not supply consumer entertainment technology directly to homes but rather via carriers such as Belgium's Belgacom or Thai network operator ADC.

Myrio will become part of Siemens Com, the German company's biggest unit, which made sales of 18 billion euros last fiscal year but an operating profit of just 569 million, as profits were drained by the mobile handsets business.