The figure and the news come courtesy of the Ottawa Business Journal, to which the 50-year-old Flick explained his seemingly amicable departure and his rationale for making the deal with the media conglomerate. 

“We had something like 18 active projects going on with (Warner),” Flick told OBJ, in a Monday interview. “That’s going to be their priority. You don’t need an entrepreneur for that.” 

Also read: WarnerMedia Buys Canadian OTT App Development Company You.i TV

Founded in 2010 as a company providing  OTT video technologies to media companies, You.i TV raised $38.1 million through seed, series B and series C rounds of funding. 

With a finite group of major media conglomerates, including WarnerMedia looking to get their content on “every piece of glass,” You.i TV needed expansion capital to keep up, Flick said.

“You’ve got to be a $100-million-a-year business, and we weren’t there yet. We were well on our way to getting to that, but we needed a D-round to get to an IPO," he explained.

Alas, Flick added, “We were not able to package ourselves properly (to potential investors). D-rounds in Canada are difficult …. We were a stone’s throw from cash-flow break-even, but that’s not really the business I wanted to run. We wanted to change the world.”

You.i TV makes OTT applications for media companies, including WarnerMedia and its parent company, AT&T, servicing the multi-platform needs of brands including including AT&T TV Now, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live and Rooster Teeth. Notably, You.i TV’s technology is the foundation for WarnerMedia’s recently launched RIDE in-car streaming platform. 

The company’s You.i Engine One enterprise development platform delivers video apps across mobile, tablet, game consoles, streaming devices, set-top boxes and smart TVs using a single codebase. The single codebase approach allows developers to build app features and make user experience changes once and then deploy across a variety of devices and operating systems, saving time and speeding delivery.

You.i TV makes OTT applications for media companies, including WarnerMedia and its parent company, AT&T, servicing the multi-platform needs of brands including including AT&T TV Now, TNT, TBS, truTV, B/R Live and Rooster Teeth. Notably, You.i TV’s technology is the foundation for WarnerMedia’s recently launched RIDE in-car streaming platform. 

The company’s You.i Engine One enterprise development platform delivers video apps across mobile, tablet, game consoles, streaming devices, set-top boxes and smart TVs using a single codebase. The single codebase approach allows developers to build app features and make user experience changes once and then deploy across a variety of devices and operating systems, saving time and speeding delivery.

WarnerMedia said You.i Engine One technology will help it deploy HBO Max across international territories starting next year. 

“The You.i Engine One technology, and the development teams behind it, are best-in-class,” said Jason Press, WarnerMedia executive VP of direct-to-consumer technology and program management, in a statement. “The You.i platform will enhance the HBO Max technology stack, increase developer efficiency, and accelerate delivery as we bring HBO Max to consumer devices all around the world.”

WarnerMedia didn’t say whether You.i TV management, including CEO Jason Flick, will remain in place, or if the company’s 200-plus employees will stay intact in Ottawa. 

The startup was founded in 2007 and privately funded with $38.1 million, with investors including the erstwhile Time Warner Inc. and Sky UK. 

Taylor has had CFO positions at March Networks, Proshred, BTI Systems, Yellow Pages, Optiva and the Ottawa Senators NHL franchise. He replaces Rob White, a noted Ottawa tech start-up presence, who quietly departed You.i TV a year ago.

White, in turn, replaced the former BelAir Networks executive Peter Rose, another Canada tech scene notable, who retired from You.i TV back in 2017.

“Companies that succeed on the global stage combine product innovation and technical excellence with a firm foundation of strategic financial management,” said Jason Flick, co-founder and CEO of You.i TV, in a statement. “Ken Taylor’s unparalleled track record as a strategic financial advisor and Ken Beaton’s storied background in scaling premium development solutions strengthens our core capabilities as we continue to grow and expand globally.”

The startup, which supplies tools for cross-platform app development, has raised a total of $35 million over three rounds, according to its Crunchbase profile. 

The latest investment was led by Causeway Media Partners, with participation from previous backers WarnerMedia, Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors and Vistara Capital Partners.

Related: You.i TV Connects with Weather Group

Bob Higgins, a partner at Causeway Media, has taken a seat on You.i TV’s board.

“We’ve been on a mission since we started to help developers take control of the fragmented world we live in. Enabling them with the right tools lets them do what they do best - build experiences that matter to users,” said Jason Flick, CEO and co-founder of You.i TV. “This is just the beginning of shaping the future of all forms of media experiences. We are excited to have Causeway join the team with their well rounded expertise in this space as we reach new markets and build out the community.”

You.i TV said it is helping A+E Networks to reach a wide range of TV-connected platforms, starting with a TV Everywhere app for History.

You.i TV said its Engine One will power a new History TVE app that’s based on the React Native development platform, a Facebook-backed open source, cloud-based framework that allows for efficient code-sharing alongside a cross-platform capability that allows for the delivery of high-performance apps spanning both mobile and TV-connected platforms.

You.i TV detailed some of its product-focused work with React Native in December. A+E Networks is its first React Native customer.

RELATED: You.i TV Puts Bigger Target on TV-Connected Platforms

Tricia Cooke, You.i TV’s VP of marketing, said the React Native approach allows app-makers to deliver similar, high-end functionality across multiple platforms rather than taking a lowest-common denominator approach that might limit the app’s functionality (such as on-screen animations and motion-based interface designs) on some TV-based streaming platforms.

A+E Networks is one of five partners that are on board with You.i TV’s early access program for React Native as the vendor works toward commercial avaialbity of an engine that takes full advantage of the app framework.

The History TVE app based on that framework is expected to launch later this year and support several platforms, including iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV.

The Weather Group, Turner, the National Basketball Association and National Geographic and are among You.i TV’s announced customers

You.i TV announced a $12 million "B" round led by Time Warner Investments in the fall of 2016.

You.i TV, a company that specializes in video apps and interfaces, said it is extending its work around React Native to a range of TV-connected platforms, including Roku devices, gaming consoles and smart TVs.

React Native is a Facebook-backed open source JavaScript project/development framework.

RELATED: You.i TV Revs Demo for Facebook-Backed React Native Project

You.i TV said it will use CES 2018 (at the C-Space exhibit at the Aria) to demo how this approach, underpinned by the You.i Engine One, can bring a high-end user experience to 10-foot platforms (including Roku) using the same code portability and efficiently that React Native enables on mobile platforms.

“While React Native is proving its worth in mobile, limitations on app scope, device reach and UX workflows lessen its value in broader cross-platform environments,” Andrew Emmons, VP of product for You.i TV, said in a statement.

“Roku stands as an integral part of any successful direct-to-consumer strategy,” added Jason Flick, CEO and co-founder of You.i TV.  “We believe that bringing React Native and Roku  together is a breakthrough for 10-foot cross platform strategies that can immediately improve the consumer experience.”

Last fall, You.i TV announced a $12 million "B" round led by Time Warner Investments. 

A major challenge that programmers and other content players face is how to reach a wide range of mobile and TV-connected screens without having to reinvent the technology for each platform.

One company that has stepped into that breach is You.i TV, an Ottawa, Canada-based firm that has developed a unified codebase that helps its partners extend a bridge to iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and PlayStation and Xbox consoles, as well as Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV devices, and even certain smart-TV platforms.

You.i TV, which counts Time Warner Investments among its top financial backers and Turner as a key client, is also baked into a direct-to-consumer platform for content providers developed by Comcast Technology Solutions.

Related: You.i TV Aims to Streamline Video’s Shift to Multiple Screens

Next TV editor Jeff Baumgartner recently spoke with Jason Flick, You.i TV’s CEO, about how the company helps partners deal with the ongoing device fragmentation challenge. An edited transcript follows.

NTV:What are your top priorities for the rest of 2017 for the business itself or at the product level?
Jason Flick: The goal is still this glass-first approach, helping our customers that own all the services [reach] the platforms that they need to get to. Scaling the business is still our top priority.

The other area that’s interesting for this year is about monetization. If we’re presenting ourselves as owning the glass for them and building that layer that customers interact with, one of the big things is monetization — TVOD [transactional video-on-demand], SVOD [subscription VOD], AVOD [advertising VOD]. Is it about selling subscriptions or selling tickets? We’ve done [work with] sporting teams where their main focus is on tickets. How that money flows is changing drastically and quickly.

Related is collecting the data piece. We collect data pre-normalized … but you have to be able to action it somehow, and we let them consistently do that.

NTV:Explain how you can support a wide range of screen types and platforms using a single codebase? How do you go about finding the similarities between them while adapting for the technical nuances?
JF: Fundamentally, the way we’ve done it, the OS [operating system] is used to abstract the hardware because it’s so fragmented today. The hardware under the hood is identical everywhere and the OSs are causing a fragmentation. We wrote the lion’s share of an OS. That’s how we’re able to get on every [platform].

There are differences for sure. Xbox is a good example. They have a snap-to grid mode, so we automatically do a best-effort snap-to grid for your app, so you don’t have to do anything.

But our code and your code complies natively on every platform, just like video games do. If there are new things available — Apple gives you exclusive access — and we predominantly deal with the tier ones, so they are getting this early access to features on the platform. You are natively running on that platform, so they can still make all of those calls.

We also talk directly to their stack … and that gets us our performance and that gets us our cross-platform. We’re really a graphics layer.

NTV:Your approach reminds me a bit of the notion of middleware in the old set-top box world. Is that a fair characterization?
JF: Middleware is a bit of a dated term. I view it a bit differently. The media companies that come to us are saying we need to own the stack. They are going to build the stack with the encoding and their authentication and they’ll collect the data. Data is huge now.

I view us as that last piece of the stack. If you want to own the stack, we’re that last mile that no one thought you could really have a stack, and yet we’ve done it. Getting the same codebase on almost 11 platforms now, there’s no one else doing that.

NTV:You support about a dozen platforms. Has that part of the video world improved or become more difficult in terms of fragmentation?
JF: To me, the players are known right now, but every year or so a new one gets added. The other factor that’s difficult to work in is that each demographic has its own preferred platform. We’re on our third big international deal and the platforms internationally are even more fragmented.

This fragmentation is going to continue. I don’t think we’re going to see a harmonization because the OSs exist to create business models. I don’t see everybody sitting back and saying, ‘I’m going to let Google own that,’ or ‘I’m going let Samsung own that.’ No very large company is going to sit back; they’ll continue to battle for the glass.

I think you’ll see more OSs. [Nintendo] Switch is one I’m excited about … Hopefully, we’ll be able to announce support for it sometime soon.

NTV:After a somewhat slow start, Android TV seems to be picking up a lot of momentum and adoption with video service providers. Have you also seen an increase in interest in Android TV from your partners and clients?
JF: We support it and we support Amazon Fire TV, which is based on it. I think you’re going to see a continual increase in [adoption].

I’m surprised also to see a bunch of these casting devices come out … and those are not working. A, it’s not a great experience unless you have a device to cast to; and B, you have a device that is plugged in. Who at 7 p.m. has enough battery left on their phone to cast for two hours? And you can’t collect data. Everyone is desperate for data right now and being able to monetize, sell you stuff and create better shows and know you better…not in a nefarious way, but to make better business models. That trend is dying, which means, automatically, that Android TV is getting some pickup.

FilmStruck, Turner’s new SVOD service for film aficionados, has added a key platform with the debut of an app for Roku players and Roku TVs.

FilmStruck, a service managed by Turner Classic Movies in partnership with the Criterion Collection, has also built support for the Google Chromecast, Apple TV (fourth generation), Amazon Fire TV, Web browsers, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as Android TV devices. FilmStruck notes on its web site that support for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is "coming soon." 

RELATED: FilmStruck Does Android TV 
Meanwhile, user experience/interface specialist You.i TV announced that it now powers apps for Roku Scene Graph 7.6, supporting standard monetization and discovery features of the platform  such as deep linking, in-app purchasing, analytics, and the Roku Advertising Framework (RAF).  FilmStruck is first-to-market on this solution, using a small 86 kilobyte BrightScript footprint, said You.i TV, which uses a unified codebase for other platforms, including iOS, Android, tvOS, Android TV, Fire TV, Xbox, PlayStation, and Tizen, among others.

RELATED: FilmStruck Goes Live on Web Browsers, Android, Fire TV

Last fall, You.i TV announced a $12 million "B" round led by Time Warner Investments. 

Looking to expand its market opportunities, You.i TV has launched a “out-of-box” platform that enables programmers and distributors to build and deploy video interfaces for a variety of screen types using a single codebase.

With that pre-packaged/pre-configured product, called You.i Engine One,  the company claims it can halve the development effort needed to bring on-demand and TV Everywhere services to smartphones, tablets and TV-connected streaming platforms.

You.i TV said it also allows partners some customization and configuration options, including core views, animation, search ratings and recommendations, using Adobe After Effects.

The approach could open the door to more deals for You.i TV, which already works with Turner Broadcasting, Sony, Rogers Communications, Corus Entertainment and the Canadian Football League, among others.

You.i TV, a company based in Ottawa, secured $15 million in funding last fall.

You.i TV, a maker of user interfaces for a wide range of video platforms, said it has landed a $12 million “B” round led by Time Warner Investments.

Tied in, Turner, a unit of Time Warner Inc., has begun to standardize their application development on the You.i Engine platform, the company said. Scott Levine, managing director, Time Warner Investments, is joining the board of Ottawa, Canada-based You.i TV.

You.i TV has raised about $21 million (C$15 million and US$12 million), following a round raised last year led by Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. Kayne Partners and new investor Vistara Capital Partners also participated in the B round.

You.iTV said the new strategic investment will be used to help it meet demand, enhance its app designer workflow intellectual property, and expand its partner channels.

The You.i Engine is already powering video apps for Sony Crackle; shomi, the SVOD service from Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications; Corus Entertainment; as well as Turner’s TNT, TBS, and FilmStruck, a direct-to-consumer SVOD service from Turner Classic Movie that’s expected to launch later this year.

“Delivering video directly to consumers is becoming vital to the media industry, and offering a compelling user interface & app experience is an important piece of this value chain,” Levine said, in a statement. 

Shomi, the multiscreen SVOD service from Canadian operators Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, has expanded its platform repertoire by launching an app for the Xbox One.

Shomi’s interface for Xbox One is powered by the You.i TV, which is also underpinning shomi’s apps for iOS and Android devices, as well as the SVOD service’s recent debut on the PlayStation 4.

“We’ve heard from many shomi members and Xbox One users that this launch is something they’ve been waiting for. We’re thrilled to have shomi available on this popular platform,” Ann Tebo, shomi’s senior director, customer experience & insights, said in a statement. “We continue to work tirelessly to make shomi available everywhere our members are looking for great entertainment.”

In addition to the aforementioned platforms, shomi also runs on Web browsers, set-top boxes from Rogers and Shaw, Xbox 360, Apple TV, and Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

Shomi launched across Canada in August 2015. The service costs C$8.99 per month. 

The joint offering will feature Quickplay’s virtual head-end and a front-end user interface from You.i TV that will help partners deliver to deliver a premium OTT video service across a wide range of connected devices, including iOS and Android smartphones and tablets,  tvOS (which powers the new Apple TV), Amazon Fire TV, Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Roku products, smart TVs as well as set-tops that use the Reference Design Kit, the preintegrated software stack for IP-capable set-tops and gateways that’s being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable.

They noted that You.i Engine’s front end technology removes the complexity of building custom multiscreen applications by outputting a single codebase. Quickplay’s managed video platform, meanwhile, provides the backend service via a software defined headend that now delivers 700 live channels and hundreds of thousands of hours of encoded VOD content, they said.

Quickplay and You.i TV, which recently scored $15 million funding and counts Sony Crackle and shomi among its partners, plan to demonstrate their handiwork at next week’s NAB show in Las Vegas.

We use them on our mobile devices and on our Internet-connected TV sets. We use them to divorce ourselves from pay TV bundles and to add streaming services into the TV mix. Apps also allow us to enjoy our pay TV services outside the home or in another room, on the smartphone or tablet — for example, by making it possible to watch DVR-recorded shows remotely.

They are part of what makes it so difficult to measure how many people are watching what programs and when, a topic of intense interest to programmers who want to make sure they’re making as much ad revenue as possible.

They do a lot. And they are such a part of our TV viewing that it’s easy to forget they are fairly new, and still evolving.

Jeff ’s story points to some of the continuing improvements — making it easier to sign on and stay signed on; letting you watch other content libraries, such as video-on-demand shows; letting you search by voice command.

“This thing is only just beginning,” Matt Nelson, marketing head for app-platform developer You.i TV, said during a panel at the TV of Tomorrow conference in New York last week. He and others on the panel had been talking about how they were trying to make apps simpler and more like alwayson TV. When you open the Crackle streaming app on Roku, for example, “the video just starts playing when you enter the interface,” he said, and not necessarily at the beginning of a show but “at a really interesting part of the video.”

Clark Pierce, senior vice president of TV Everywhere at Fox Sports, talked about the company first wanting the Fox Sports Go app to open up with lots of stats and graphs and on-demand video options. “Very close to launch, we made a very big pivot and we just focused on the live streaming of video.” Now, he said, a focus is on reducing the delay between what you see from a live event on, say, FS1 and what you see on the app.

Helge Hoibraaten, CEO of Norwegian OTT vendor Vimond, showed an image of the Reuters TV app, which delivers personalized news programs. “Why do I love this? Because it’s so simple. You just open the app, and it hits you with the full-screen TV experience that is guessing what you want to see, and it’s up to date. You don’t have to click anything.”

What we like now, it seems, is only going to keep getting better.

You.i TV, a Ottawa-based company that specializes in advanced user interfaces for a variety of video platforms, has closed a $15 million round of capital led by Kayne Partners.

You.i TV said the funding will help the company create a channel of partner agencies to build multiscreen apps for its You.i Engine SDK (software development kit). The You.i Engine, the company said, powers apps across iOS, tvOS (the OS for the new Apple TV box), Android, Amazon Fire, Xbox, PlayStation, Roku, smart TVs and set-tops that use the Reference Design Kit, the integrated software stack that’s being managed by Comcast, Liberty Global and Time Warner Cable.

You.i TV’s announced partners include Sony Crackle (for its Roku app), the TreeHouseGO app for iOS and Android, Corus Entertainment, and shomi, the multiscreen SVOD service from Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications that recently became available to all Canadians. Privately held You.i TV was founded in 2008.

“This is a unique moment in the evolution of television,” Jason Flick, co-founder and CEO of You.i TV, said in a statement.  “Even Apple agrees, saying during its tvOS event last week that ‘the future of TV is apps.’ Everyone in the industry is racing to build direct-to-consumer relationships via applications, but the technical environment is so fragmented that traditional approaches just don’t scale. Our You.i Engine is the missing ingredient broadcasters need to launch truly immersive applications on every screen.”