Facebook Snaps Up QuickFire
- Friday, January 9th, 2015
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We may be just nine days into 2015, but Facebook has already completed its second acquisition of the year, with the purchase of video compression specialist QuickFire Networks.
QuickFire was founded on the premise that the current network infrastructure is not sufficient to support the massive consumption of video that’s happening online without compromising on video quality. The company says it solves this capacity problem via proprietary technology that “dramatically reduces the bandwidth needed to view video online without degrading video quality”.
In a statement on its website, QuickFire CEO Craig Y. Lee says that some key members of its team will be joining Facebook and that it will wind down its business operations.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced the acquisition of speech recognition firm Wit.ai, and the move comes just one day after Facebook revealed that the number of videos posted per user rose by 75 per cent during 2014.
As we reported yesterday, Facebook has averaged more than 1bn video views a day since June of last year, with 50 per cent of daily US Facebook users watching at least one video a day, and 76 per cent of US users saying they discover the videos they watch on Facebook.