Last month Ericsson announced it was pulling out of the cable making business. It cited the decline in the copper cable market the move of fibre production to Asia. In April it acquired Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV business.

Now it is acquiring Red Bee Media. Red Bee started life in 2002 as BBC Broadcast, a commercial division of the BBC that would concentrate on content creation and channel management. It was spun off and renamed Red Bee in 2005, when it was acquired by Creative Broadcast Services, a company funded by Australia’s Macquarie Bank.

The deal is another significant step on Ericsson’s long journey from old style equipment manufacturer to new style media infrastructure provider. The Mediaroom deal made Ericsson the leading provider of IPTV and multi-screen TV worldwide, and its 2012 acquisition of Technicolor's Broadcast Services Division made it a bigger player in broadcast services a division it started in 2007.

Ericsson says the Red Bee acquisition supports its strategy to grow further in the broadcast services market. “It takes advantage of our technology and services leadership to help broadcasters and content owners address the convergence of video and mobility,” said Thorsten Sauer, Ericsson’s head of broadcast services, in an interview with iTWire.

“Like the industry, we’re in a continuous transformation process. Ericsson is broadening its services to broadcasters, in areas like content management, playout, video publishing and related services. We want to help broadcasters make video more accessible by making more video more accessible on more platforms.”

Red Bee has 1500 employees and operations in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Australia. The Australian operation grew out of Red Bee’s acquisition of the Australian Caption Centre in 2006. The cost of the Ericsson acquisition was not disclosed.

Red Bee provides a range of media services. They include media asset management, digital video publishing, multilingual access services and creative services to major broadcasters and broadband platforms. It is also the largest editorial metadata provider in Europe, delivering more than 100,000 hours of subtitling per year for leading broadcasters.

“The TV and media industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation driven by consumers' appetite for rich, interactive, anytime, anywhere entertainment,” says Sauer. The confluence of communications, broadband and media technologies and the use of IP and mobile networks to generate and deliver such experiences is creating new opportunities in the ecosystem.”

According to the Ericsson Mobility Report June 2013 release, video is the single biggest contributor to traffic in mobile networks and this is expected to grow 60% annually until the end of 2018.

The report shows that in Australia 60% of Internet users are streaming video from services like YouTube on their smartphones and 22% watch live TV on their smartphones. When asked about tablet use, 26% said they watch TV or other video content on tablet.

The research data is from earlier this year, compiled from on-line survey responses from 500 Australian daily Internet users aged between 16 and 60.

“Ericsson is making a step change to our business, cementing our commitment to TV and broadcast services and continuing a journey we started in 2007,” says Sauer. “We can create value for broadcasters by making digital content more accessible, enabling monetisation of TV content more efficiently.

“Video traffic shows very strong uptake in the mobile networks and Ericsson can address the need of both broadcasters and telecom operators through our technology expertise and services capabilities.”