Tech giant Google made a bid to expand its cloud services offerings to big media companies yesterday with the announcement that it has acquired Anvato. The company provides a software platform that automates the encoding, editing, publishing, and distribution of video content across multiple platforms.
The Mountain View, Calif. startup has already won over some major media companies on its own, including NBC Universal, Fox Sports, and Univision. Anvato will now become part of the Google Cloud Platform, a group that provides services such as compute, storage and databases, networking, and big data capabilities to enterprises through the cloud. Google said Anvato’s Media Content Platform will complement its efforts to enable scalable media processing and workflows in the cloud.
Transforming Video Distribution
“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,” Belwadi Srikanth, senior product manager for Google Cloud Platform wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “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, Srikanth said the acquisition will help Google with its plans to focus on delivering video infrastucture solutions via the cloud to businesses in the media and entertainment industries. That includes helping to manage their infrastructures more efficiently, provision servers and networks at rapid scale, and remove unnecessary overhead.
Anvato said that it is the only video platform that guarantees video playback and monetization from signal to screen. Unlike other solutions that rely on hardware components, Anvato’s platform is strictly a software solution, allowing it to run on off-the-shelf hardware and making it easier to update and more modular to deploy.
Media companies use Anvato to power multi-screen live streaming, video publishing, live and video-on-demand distribution, and monetization strategies.
Video Cloud Space Heating Up
The acquisition should help bolster Google’s cloud offerings with respect to its biggest competitors. Amazon has already entered the field of video infrastructure services with AWS Digital Media and its Elemental Technologies subsidiary, which it acquired last year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Azure service has its own Media Services platform, which is already used by major entertainment companies. Last year, IBM acquired Anvato competitor Clearleap, and earlier this year Big Blue acquired Ustream to help bring more user generated content to its cloud.
Google’s acquisition of Anvato is the tech giant’s latest attempt to woo media companies over to its cloud service offerings. In April, the company announced that its Cloud Content Delivery Network, a service that helps speed delivery of media content by caching it closer to users, would be going into beta.
That same month, Google also announced that it had teamed up with Autodesk to create a new service called Autodesk Maya for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render, a new rendering technology for digital artists and content creators.
