The Journey to Sell: Why Imagine Communications Chose Lumine Group as a Permanent Owner

Why Imagine Chose to Sell

Imagine’s customers, who are broadcasters, station groups, video distributors, and streaming platforms, are living through their own upheaval. Consolidation, new partnerships, and a scramble for audience attention and advertising revenue that used to belong to them alone. That pressure, Steve says, made the ownership question impossible to keep putting off. “If we’re the technology supplier that someone is depending on for a major sporting event or championship game, you have to get it right the first time. They can’t stop the game to rerun a play because the system glitched.”

Imagine’s systems run the production, playout, and advertising workflows that customers can’t easily pause or rebuild once they’re live, which makes supplier stability a real business question for them, not a courtesy. For twelve-plus years, Imagine didn’t have a clean answer. The private equity firm that owned Imagine was never going to hold it forever; that isn’t how private equity works, and customers knew it, and the questions came consistently. “We’ve got questions around: can I still trust you to deliver the most important pieces of my business? Can I trust you to deliver the video? Can I trust you to deliver the advertising?”

Those questions are part of the reason that sent Steve looking for a different kind of owner, an acquirer who wouldn’t eventually need to sell. Imagine’s customers were making long-term decisions about their own businesses and wanted confidence that the technology providers they depended on would be there alongside them. As ownership questions continued to surface year after year, Steve came to see that providing a clear, permanent answer mattered just as much as delivering the technology itself.

What Made the Lumine Experience Different

Lumine wasn’t a name Reynolds heard for the first time at the negotiating table. He’d met Lumine’s M&A team years earlier. Every year after that, they’d show up at IBC and NAB, ask what Imagine was working on, and check back in.

For Steve, that long-standing relationship changed the starting point. By the time a sale was on the table, Lumine already understood more than the numbers. It had taken time to understand how Imagine operated, what mattered to its customers, and where the business could go next. That made the conversation different from meeting a buyer for the first time during a transaction process.

It helped, too, that Lumine understood media software specifically. Steve wanted an owner that lived inside communications and media software every day, with the pricing models, customer-care structures, and Playbooks to show for it. He comments, “not only is Lumine focused on growing software companies, but they’re focused on growing those companies in our space, our world. They’re in the telecom and media space, and that is a specific operating segment.”

Steve knew the next owner would shape more than the transaction. A strategic buyer may have valued one part of Imagine more than another, raising questions about whether the business would remain intact. Another private equity owner could have restarted the same cycle of uncertainty for customers and employees. For a company whose products support long-standing, mission-critical customer relationships, that risk mattered. “We have these long-term partnerships with our customers, and we needed to know we had that same kind of long-term partnership with the company that owns us.” Lumine offered a different path: permanent ownership, combined with a focused understanding of communications and media software. Its buy-and-hold model addressed the ownership question, while its expertise and selectivity gave Steve confidence that Imagine was being acquired by a company that understood the value of the whole business.

Asked what he’d tell another CEO facing the same decision, Steve comes back to the years spent before any deal was on the table. “It’s important to get to know one another, to make sure Lumine understands how your business really operates and where you want to take it.”

What This Means for Customers and Employees

When the acquisition was announced, Steve’s priority was to communicate directly with key customers and explain what would remain consistent. Those conversations were less about deal mechanics and more about reassurance: Imagine would continue to support the products, people, and systems customers had built their businesses around.

That mattered because many of Imagine’s largest customer relationships span well over a decade. Under a temporary ownership model, long tenure can raise questions about what comes next. Under Lumine’s permanent ownership model, Steve saw it differently: those relationships became a foundation to build on. Customers who rely on both Imagine’s advertising and playout businesses could continue working with one company, supported by this forever owner focused on keeping the business intact and investing for the future.

Employees were asking a version of the same question customers were, not just who owns the company next, but whether that owner would keep investing in it. Steve points to Lumine’s selectivity as the reassurance, “they like the company, they like the products, they like the customer list, and they want to keep them. That’s what forever home means.” The fact that Lumine chose Imagine, rather than treating it as one more line on a portfolio, said something about intent.

For employees, the reassurance is about direction. Permanent ownership gives Imagine a clearer long-term foundation to continue investing in its products, its customer relationships, and the people needed to support both.

Looking to the Future 

Imagine’s roots reach back further than its current name. Before 2014, its technology traced through Harris, Leitch, and Encoda – brands responsible for some of broadcast’s foundational moments, including the first HD broadcast ever aired. Steve treats that history as something to build on.

Inside the company today, an Imagine engineer and SMPTE fellow, chaired the drafting committee behind the SMPTE ST-2110 suite of specifications – the standard much of the broadcast industry now runs on. That’s the kind of work Steve points to as proof Imagine is still setting direction, not just maintaining what it built decades ago.

Television went from black and white to colour, from over-the-air to cable, from early mobile phones to smartphones. Steve expects the same kind of change ahead and this time toward connected TV platforms that blend live streaming with on-demand. “The world will change. But if that same set of companies are still on the buying side, having solid long-term relationships really matters.” What doesn’t change, in his view, is which companies are doing the buying: many of the same broadcasters and media companies will still be setting the industry’s direction years from now, which is exactly why the relationships built with them are worth protecting.

Being part of Lumine gives Imagine a way to grow into that future without having to build all the scale itself. Steve points to early access to programs Lumine already runs with large vendors and companies, as one example of scale that comes without extra M&A. Imagine has the autonomy to continue building but now with a bigger organization’s resources behind it.

Looking Ahead to IBC: AI With a Practical Purpose

We sat down with Steve just before IBC 2026. Asked what he expects to see at IBC this year, Steve gave an answer shaped by the same practical instinct that ran through the rest of the conversation: technology matters when it helps people do their work better, not when it’s impressive on its own.

The last few years at IBC, he says, were dominated by operations, remote production, cloud workflows, automation, redundancy, and cost. Some of that was forced by the pandemic, when live sports and major events had to keep running without the usual crews and equipment on-site. By last year, most of that had stabilized. This year, Steve expects the conversation to move to what comes next, and AI will be a big part of it.

For Imagine, that doesn’t mean chasing demos of what AI can technically do. “We’re not trying to replace the experts on our customers’ teams with AI. We’re trying to make those experts better at their jobs,” Steve said. It means asking where AI can improve a workflow, strengthens automation, or helps an experienced team spend less time on the technical parts of their job.

Television and advertising, Steve points out, are still fundamentally human businesses built on the emotion and judgment that live sports, breaking news, and creative campaigns depend on. AI can take on the traffic logs and reconciliation reports. It can’t yet do the parts of the job that make people watch. “So let the robots go do the mechanical stuff and let the people focus on making the business better.”

About the Acquisition 

Lumine Group announced its acquisition of Imagine Communications on July 1, 2026. Headquartered in the United States, Imagine provides Video Connectivity Solutions, Channel Origination software and hardware, and AI-enabled Advertising Management and Monetization solutions. The deal adds origination to Lumine’s existing video processing business and expands its footprint in TV monetization, deepening Lumine’s presence across the media supply chain.

Imagine continues to operate under its own brand, with its existing leadership team in place, as it heads into IBC and the years after it as part of Lumine’s media portfolio.