Content delivery network provider PeerCDN has been acquired by Yahoo, the company has informed TechCrunch, in a deal the terms of which were not disclosed. The startup revealed its project earlier this year, which is based on real-time communication tech WebRTC and which makes it possible for visitors to sites to do things like chat via text or video while browsing without any additional software.
PeerCDN’s tech delivers site resources like images, videos and downloads via a peer-to-peer network of people currently visiting a website using WebRTC, which reduces some of the bandwidth costs of the website provider by letting visitors share the burden.
It’s an interesting tech that has some immediately apparent value for Yahoo: The company has recently been dealing with some mail outages that affected a small percentage of users for a lengthy period of time. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that it was due to a “rare” error, but if it’s related to server capacity this could help.
It could also be very useful with native Yahoo audio and video content, and the company is clearly making a play with that, as indicated by recent hires including David Pogue and Katie Couric. Providing a lot of rich media content is a bandwidth heavy affair, and the whole point of PeerCDN’s network is to defray that cost away from the content provider’s servers.
Yahoo provided the following statement on the acquisition and how the small startup’s three-person engineering team will be folded into the company:
Yahoo has acquired PeerCDN. The team has a solid background in domain expertise and a passion for video that makes them a perfect fit for Yahoo. Three engineers have joined our media organization in Sunnyvale.