Facebook is kicking off 2015 with a series of acquisitions.
The social network announced Thursday that it has acquired QuickFire Networks, a video infrastructure startup, as part of its continued effort to expand and improve the video experience on site.
“Video is an essential part of the Facebook experience,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We are excited to bring QuickFire Networks on board as we continue delivering a high quality video experience to the over 1.3 billion people who use Facebook.”
The small startup was founded in 2012 and says it developed proprietary technology to cut the bandwidth required to consume videos without cutting the quality.
Facebook has doubled down on video in recent months — as you probably noticed during the Ice Bucket Challenge last year — in an effort to ramp up video ad revenue and perhaps attract more TV ad dollars. It now serves more than 1 billion video views a day on average.
The acquisition comes at a time when the online video space is heating up. YouTube is courting top creative talent and Twitter is expected to launch a video product of its own in the near future. Any leg up in the user experience could be crucial, which may be what Facebook hopes to gain from its latest acquisition.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it had acquired Wit.ai, another smaller company, which develops speech recognition and natural language processing tools for developers.
Terms of the QuickFire deal were not immediately disclosed.
Source: Mashable.com