Yahoo! has acquired Israel-based, online video streaming company RayV for an undisclosed sum.
“I’m thrilled to announce that we have acquired RayV, a company with an exciting approach to online video streaming in the rapidly evolving mobile space,” wrote P.P.S. Narayan, VP of cloud platforms and services at Yahoo, in a blog post.
RayV said about the deal: “Our team began the RayV journey with the goal of building a revolutionary video distribution platform that would provide a better video experience for viewers over the internet, while easing the distribution process for content creators. Over the last eight years, we have done just that.”
RayV is a company with research and development operations in Tel Aviv, Israel and offices in Los Angeles. It offers cloud-based software to manage and deliver enhanced high-quality video streaming over the web to wireless gadgets and other mobile devices.
The company uses its own version of peer-to-peer distribution (see example on the chart below). RayV says about is technique: “In a classical CDN solution, a player who requests to watch a stream will entirely download it from the CDN servers, and even though the data may be cached on local relays, the whole upstream load is still impacted to the broadcasting entity.
“RayV’s Cloud OTT reduces server upload costs and hardware resources by relying on data shared between end users – the peers of our grid. Our solution is based on ‘helping peers’ – i.e. RayV clients running in idle mode – to which we send an encrypted fraction of a given VOD stream. This seeding stage can be undertaken for example during off-peak time thus reducing server load at peak hours.”
