While Google has had more than their fair share of original ideas and creations over the years, some of their best stuff normally ends up coming from buying up smaller companies. In their Google Cloud Platform service suite, video capabilities aren’t as scalable, automated or user-friendly as Google would like. They’re hoping to change that by buying out video specialist firm Anvato. Having been in the business since 2008, Anvato is no stranger to large-scale automated video handling and serving, but also has a very user-friendly way of touching up and putting out videos. Google is hoping to leverage this technology and Anvato’s team to beef up their own video services in their Google Cloud Platform.
Since the entire premise of Google Cloud Services is built on over the top services, meaning any app, service or media delivered over the cloud without calling for much horsepower from the receiving machine, it only makes sense that they would be looking to enhance their over the top video offerings to attract more media-focused customers and enable current customers to do a wider range of things with video without having to spend more on their own on-site infrastructure. Anvato does have a sizeable customer base of their own, of course, and will continue to serve them as normal after the acquisition is complete, while also lending their hardware and engineering expertise to Google to help them bolster their over the top video offerings.
The official blog post from Google says that they will be dropping more details on the acquisition “in the coming months”, likely pointing to a slow and gradual rollout of Anvato’s services and inventory in their own product. This makes sense, since the products would have to be integrated carefully with Google’s own existing cloud offerings to avoid any possible incompatibilities and to optimize the new services for a good balance between overhead management and customer experience. Google is hoping that this move will help customers to scale out their existing video efforts to reach a wider range of customers on a wider range of platforms with little to no overhead or strain on their own resources.