Video Company Widevine Acquired By Google

Video Company Widevine Acquired By Google

Google may have lost out on its acquisition of Groupon last week but the company announced they will acquire video optimization and digital rights management (DRM) company Widevine.  The internet is swirling with speculation as to whether the company was acquired to help protect content with its DRM technology or if the acquisition will be used to better stream content with Widevine’s adaptive video streaming technology.

Our best guess is Google probably saw value in both pieces of the business.  However, the adaptive video streaming capabilities should be exciting to anyone interested in online video, YouTube and Google TV.  Three specific claims from the company’s website got our attention.  First, to enhance the user’s experience the technology determines the user’s bandwidth and provides the best picture quality available for that particular moment.  However, because it is adapting the video in realtime it will continue to provide a better version of the video as the bandwidth gets better.  Second, the video company also claims to offer a “Blu-ray-like” video experience for users.  Unlike most progressive online video, the user does not have to put up with video buffering as they jump to different parts of the video.  Instead, Widevine will just “flash video frames” as the user selects a different part of the video much like Blu-ray.  Finally, the most exciting claim for Google is the claim Widevine makes about video delivery costs.  They claim their technology offers the “lowest cost video delivery available.”  That’s got to be pretty exciting to Google as their YouTube property absorbs about 30 hours of new video per minute!

We think Google got the better deal last week while saving about 5 billion dollars.  Although, they still might buy Groupon, Google might decide to just build a Groupon killer if they have a spare 10 minutes because the technology is not exactly rocket science.   If Google builds their own ‘couponator’ they could immediately leverage their clients they have from their AdWords and DoubleClick businesses.

Below are a couple of screenshots from videos found on Widevine’s website.

Rewatchable is a Boston corporate video company.