Google has announced their acquisition of the eight year old video-streaming company Anvato Inc. Belwadi Srikanth, Senior Product Manager of the Google Cloud Platform, has confirmed this information in a blog post onThursday, July 7. Anvato provides a software platform that fully automates the encoding, editing, publishing and secure distribution of video content across multiple platforms.
The CEO of Anvato, Alper Turgut, has announced on the company website, “We are thrilled to bring together Anvato with the scale and power of Google Cloud Platform to provide the industry’s best offering for OTT and mobile video. This will allow us to supercharge our capabilities, accelerate the pace of innovation, and deliver tomorrow’s video solutions faster, enabling media companies to better serve their customers“.
Google may have several reasons for wanting to add Anvato to its cloud platform- the award-winning company boasts of a client list that includes NBC Universal, Fox Sports, Univision and Gray TV.With this latest acquisition,it seems that Google intends to push its Cloud Platform as an option for media companies. In the recent past, Google had invested in a few additions to their cloud platform, the most notable one being their$380 million purchase of Bebop around November 2015.They have also acquired a $400 million to $600 million contract from Apple for cloud services.
Srikanth wrote in his post,”The cloud is transforming the way video content is created and distributed to an array of connected devices, as well as the way users engage with this content. And in recent years, the adoption of over-the-top (OTT) technologies has emerged as a critical platform for delivering rich audio, video and other media via the Internet.
With OTT adoption rapidly accelerating, the Cloud Platform and Anvato teams will work together to deliver cloud solutions that help businesses in the media and entertainment industry scale their video infrastructure efforts and deliver high-quality, live video and on-demand content to consumers on any device — be it their smartphone, tablet or connected television.”
The purchase indicates competition with Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft offers broadcasters its Azure Media Services which provideson-demand and live video streaming with integrated content delivery network capabilities, while Amazonoffers dedicated media services and also owns Elemental, which uses its platform to offer a set ofend-to-end solutions and boasts of having ESPN, HBO and the BBC among its customers.
At a time like this, Google’s latest move hardly comes as a surprise.How much Google has paid for Anvato has not yet been unveiled, but how they plan to integrate Anvato’s services will be revealed in the coming months.
