NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Facebook buys yet another tech startup, this time for video
Facebook Inc. has just bought video tech startup QuickFire Networks, adding the company to the social network’s growing army of technology assets, including the recently added voice recognition startup, Wit.ai.
The startup designs technology that can be used to process and transcode video efficiently, improving video frameworks to enable media to be loaded quickly with high quality.
“QuickFire Networks was founded on the premise that the current network infrastructure is not sufficient to support the massive consumption of video that’s happening online without compromising on video quality,” wrote QuickFire Networks CEO Craig Y. Lee in a post announcing the company’s purchase by Facebook.
The buyout likely signals rapid growth ahead for the startup’s technology, which will now have the immense resources of a multi-billion dollar company with a built-in user base of roughly one-eighth of the world’s population.
“We’re ready to take the next step in our growth,” Lee wrote. “Facebook has more than one billion video views on average every day and we’re thrilled to help deliver high quality video experiences to all the people who consume video on Facebook.”
According to Lee, “some key members” of QuickFire Networks will also be joining Facebook as its business is transitioned over to the social media company.
Facebook’s big video push
During October’s “Q&A with Mark” community town hall meeting, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that in five years Facebook would be “mostly video.” The last year has seen a significant increase in the social network’s push for more video content.
Facebook has slowly been improving its video functionality, and it has also been trying to draw in popular content creators by allegedly offering incentives to well known YouTube celebrities to create exclusive video for Facebook.
More recently, the site began testing out video-focused pages for media-heavy users like ABC News, allowing the user to pin favorite videos at the top and break up their library into different categories.
A less popular feature introduced in 2014 included video ads that would auto-play when users scrolled past them, a feature that is also being rolled out to Facebook’s mobile app.
At least with the new acquisition of QuickFire Networks, the ads might load faster and look better.
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