Facebook has been pushing its video capabilities as a key component of its overall strategy over the past year, and today, the company took another step in that direction. QuickFire Networks, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup, announced this week that it has been acquired by Facebook. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
QuickFire’s technology lets people stream high-quality video without eating up tons of bandwidth – key for mobile users who only have a limited amount of data on a cellular connection. That’s good news for Facebook, which has been pushing its video technology to content creators and users alike. Reducing the amount of bandwidth that a high-quality video takes up would be a good way to attract movie users to Facebook video over other platforms like YouTube.
Judging from the language in QuickFire’s blog post, the deal looks like an acqui-hire: some of the company’s employees will be joining Facebook, and it will be winding down its business operations.
This is the second acquisition by Facebook this week. On Monday, the social networking titan bought Wit.ai, a startup that makes it easy for developers to process spoken queries in software without having to handle the voice recognition themselves.
