Google has acquired Episodic an online video hosting platform, according to a blog post on the startup’s site. Google has confirmed the acquisition. We are told that Episodic’s technology will be folded into YouTube, and its staff will be joining YouTube’s office in San Bruno, Calif. next week. Details on the acquisition price were not disclosed.
Episodic’s publishing suite lets users manage and measure video content, and use the platform’s monetization services which enable ad insertion and credit card transactions for both live and on-demand video streaming. The suite itself is made up of five functional areas, including the ability to create video libraries, customer metadata fields, and the ability to encode. The player itself works on both the web and mobile browsers. Currently, Episodic is formatted for the iPhone only but Android, Blackberry and Symbian device support are coming soon. Interestingly, Episodic also offers an ad server that is interoperable with all major ad serving platforms, letting users insert ads into videos via a fairly simple process.
Like YouTube, Episodic also offers an analytics engine that gives publishers real-time metrics and reporting around audience engagement, viewer performance, network quality and the quality of the overall viewing experience. And the platform offers users the ability to syndicate videos to other destinations like Hulu, iTunes and Amazon. With Episodic, content producers can also build custom branded iPhone applications around their media.
Google has been on quite a buying spree this year, acquiring online photo editor Picnik, Microsoft Office collaboration tool DocVerse, iPhone email app reMail, and social search startup Aardvark in 2010.
We are thrilled to announce that Episodic has been acquired by Google. The entire Episodic team is extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our customers and the evolution of online video.
The Episodic team will join Google and continue its work to bring a great video experience to the Web, mobile phones and IPTV devices. There will be no interruption in service for existing Episodic customers.
At Episodic, we have always felt that these are the very early days of online video and that there is far more growth to be had. To put it in perspective, our industry is barely 15 years old. We’ve just received our learner’s permit, we still can’t drive without adult supervision and we’re certainly not old enough to buy a drink…legally.
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.
Speaking of our fabulous customers, we want to thank you all for your support and your willingness to experiment and sit on the bleeding edge with our team. We can’t wait to show you all what’s coming.