Facebook Inc (FB) Acquires QuickFire, A Video Compression Start-up

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Facebook has acquired QuickFire Networks, a video compression company, to support its efforts to become a major player in the video category. QuickFire is popular for converting different video formats and making them downloadable with less bandwidth while retaining video quality.

Facebook Inc (FB) Acquires QuickFire, A Video Compression Start-up

Facebook strengthening its video feature

Facebook posted on its website, “QuickFire Networks will provide you with the weapons necessary to meet the onslaught of the video revolution.”

The social networking site is making efforts to enable users to upload videos directly onto its platform instead of linking through through another video site such as YouTube. By hosting videos, Facebook will be able to keep users on its platform, thus gaining more control over how the videos are viewed and positioned around advertising. With QuickFire’s technology, Facebook will be able to move ahead quickly with its plans.

Users witnessed a big change in Facebook’s video settings last year with videos playing automatically in their News Feeds. Facebook has recognized the importance of playing those videos as fast as possible, especially on mobile phones.

QuickFire, a talent pool

Facebook might also be interested in the talent pool QuickFire brings. The key executives at QuickFire are Craig Lee, CEO of the company; CTO Mike Coward, founder of Continuous Computing, which was bought by Radisys in 2011; and Amit Puntambekar, vice president of software engineering, who was a media architect at Intel. QuickFire has announced that it will wind up its business and that a few of its core members will join Facebook.

QuickFire chief executive officer Craig Lee wrote on the company’s website that now they are ready to step up their growth process. Lee said Facebook has more than one billion video views on an average every day, and QuickFire is excited to deliver high quality video experiences to all users watching video on Facebook.

Quickfire Networks’ technology includes T-Video, which is equipped with a 1U rack meant for processing and transcoding the video. The architecture includes 11 Intel Core i7 processors and GPUs. The user will be able to get 1,760 core video deployments with the full rack of T-Video. QuickFire.tv is the part of QuickFire launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. QuickFire.tv is concerned with removing bottlenecks and delivers its compute power as a service.

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

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