Mountain View, California — Streaming TV is a flourishing service across the globe, and as it appears that soon this pocket will get crowded with more companies shifting focus to streaming TV. Search engine behemoth Google has just entered this space with its fifth acquisition of Episodic, a platform for broadcasting live and on-demand video, which is presumably being selected to help out with the Google-owned Youtube video service.
The announcement was made last weekend by Episodic in a blog post, but financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed. The search giant, which has recently been on a buying bonanza, was long rumored to be eying Episodic’s larger and more established video hosting rival Brightcove.
Recently, a new trend is catching up the heat, with various television broadcasting studios have announced apps that will allow streaming for full episodes will be coming to the iPad.
Episodic, a San Francisco-based start-up established by Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich, portrays itself as a “comprehensive system for broadcasting live and on-demand video to the web or any web-enabled device,” said it would join Google and continue working on its online video products. It said there would be no interruptions to its existing customers. Episodic announced the acquisition in a blog post Friday.
Episodic is an online video broadcasting service and publishing suite, and features the capability to publish live streams and on-demand content, which empowers clients to manage and measure video content, as well as use its platform’s monetization services for ad insertion and credit card transactions for live as well as on-demand video streaming.
The suite helps clients create video libraries and customer meta-data fields, as well as an in-depth analytics tool that gives them real-time information on viewers’ experiences. Its video player, meanwhile, works on both the Web and mobile browsers.
“We have always believed that these are the very early days of online video and that there is far more growth to be had,” Lovinsky and Cudich said on Friday. “From our earliest discussions with Google, it was clear that the teams shared this belief and together we obviously see huge potential in online video. Our product visions were also complimentary and together we will continue to produce innovative video technology for our customers and their viewers.”
Currently, Episodic is optimized for the iPhone, but support for Android, Blackberry and Symbian mobile devices is on the way, according to the startup. Episodic also offers an ad server that can be employed with all major ad-delivering platforms, thus users can insert ads into videos through a relatively simple process.
Episodic’s technology and employee will now be incorporated into YouTube, the company’s co-founders Lovinsky and Cudich said in a co-authored blog post on Friday.
“The Episodic team will join Google and continue its work to bring a great video experience to the Web, mobile phones and IPTV devices,” they said. “There will be no interruption in service for existing Episodic customers.”
However, for the moment, new account sign-up has been put on hold, though users can register to be contacted once the acquisition has been sorted out.
Across a number of sectors, Google has been acquiring startups faster than entrepreneurs can get them off the ground. This either indicates that Google plans on taking over and remolding online video, or that Google is just looking to keep to its promise to buy one small company each month. Earlier this year, the search giant also purchased reMail — a popular iPhone application that provides fast full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP email accounts — for an undisclosed sum, as well as Aardvark, a social search engine, for $50 million.
Google has not concretely expressed what its plans for Episodic is just yet, but most likely the company’s platform will somehow be integrated into YouTube.