Facebook buys Quickfire to ensure high quality video

Quickfire technology helps reduce the bandwidth needed to view video

So Facebook is really getting into this whole video thing!

Just a day after releasing some impressive new video stats, Facebook has gone and made another big purchase in the space, this time picking up video infrastructure company QuickFire Networks.

"QuickFire Networks 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 wrote in a blog post on its homepage on Thursday.

"Over the past few years, the team has worked hard to meet the demanding needs of content creators around the world. Ultimately our goal has always been to provide a premium quality, immediate, bandwidth-friendly video experience to consumers."

No financial terms of the deal have been disclosed, but it was revealed that "some key members" of the 20 employees who currently work at Quickfire will be joining Facebook and the company will be winding down its business operations. The company is acquiring both the team and the technology, and those that do join will be working from both Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, as well as its Seattle office.

Founded in 2012, the San Diego-based Quickfire is the developer of technology that reduces the amount of bandwidth needed to view video online without degrading video quality. The acquisition of Quickfire's technology has obvious implications for Facebook video: more and more people are watching video  on the site, and it wants to make sure that quality does not decrease as a result.

Since July of last year, Facebook has been seeing over one billion views every single day, with 65% of those views occurring on a mobile device. Facebook has over 1.2 billion users, and now more than half of them watch at least one video day. Even the he number of video posts per person has increased, going up 75% globally. That number is even higher, 94%, in the United States. That has amounted to the number of videos, from both users and from advertisers, increasing 3.6 times in that span.

Quickfire's technology is designed to make sure that videos, both put up by individuals, but especially those from advertisers, remain high quality.

Video has become more important to Facebook because, to put it simply, there is a lot of money to be made.  According to a report out from Business Insider in July of last year, video ad revenue is set to grow faster than any other medium, save for mobile. They will reach nearly $5 billion in 2016, nearly doubling from $2.8 billion in 2013.

Facebook hasn't been doing video for very long, which makes it's dominant position even more impressive.

After much delay, Facebook finally launched its video ads in March of last year. Each ad is 15 seconds long, and will begin playing without sound, as to not become intrusive. They will stop if the user scrolls past, but if they click on the video it will expand into full screen and play with sound.

Quickfire is Facebook's second acquisition in the space; the company gave a boost to its video ad unit in July, with the purchase of online video distribution and ad-platform LiveRail.

LiveRail helps companies, including Major League Baseball, ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion, to serve better ads in the videos that appear on their websites and apps. It also provides increased targeting capabilities. The company delivers over 7 billion video ads each month.

VatorNews has reached out to Quickfire for more details on the acquisition, including financials and how many workers will be making the transitition to the new company. We will update this story if we learn more. 

(Image source: quickfirenetworks-brochure.com)