YouTube Continues To Amp Up Its Content Quality, Buys Green Parrot Pictures

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

YouTube seems laser-focused on amping up its overall content quality as of late, with the acquisition of original video site Next New Networks just last week and today’s news that it has acquired digital video technology company Green Parrot Pictures.

“Some of YouTube’s most popular or moving videos are shot using low-quality mobile phones and video cameras. Take, for example, videos of recent protests in Libya. Although emotionally captivating, they can be jerky, blurry or unsteady.

What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos — sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video — all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site? You can imagine how excited we were when we discovered an small, ambitious company based in Ireland that can do exactly this.”

Green Parrot’s technology has been used in movies like The Lord Of The Rings and X-men, improving the quality of videos while decreasing bandwith hogging and improving speed. YouTube has hundreds of millions of users and sees 35 hours of video from all over the world uploaded to the site every minute, but the quality of the content is sometimes negligible. And the company needs to step it up if it wants to compete with cable.

The acquisition of Green Parrot Pictures is just one small step in this long march towards being the go-to destination for niche video.

Company: YouTube
Website: youtube.com
Launch Date: February 2005
Funding: $11.5M

YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

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