Yahoo finally has its video distribution platform.
Following flirtations with Hulu, Dailymotion and NDN, the company pulled the trigger Friday on Rayv, an Israeli company focused on high-quality video.
In a post on Yahoo-owned Tumblr, Yahoo’s VP of cloud platform and services, P.P.S. Narayan, described how the deal is meant to enhance Yahoo’s “underlying technology infrastructure” in video.
“Yahoo is focused on growing video users and monthly streams, and while we’re only getting started, we’re very focused on this in 2014,” Narayan wrote. Yahoo did not disclose financial terms.
Rayv’s website, now dominated by a message about the acquisition, describes Rayv’s “full end-to-end solution that enables improved high-quality streaming for our online and mobile video content partners.”
This acquisition is important for Yahoo because it doesn’t have the video inventory it needs to compete with power players like YouTube.
“YouTube gets billions of views every month and Yahoo does not have that same inventory available, so acquisition is the way to go,” Aravindh Vanchesan, director of the digital media practice at research firm Frost and Sullivan, told AdExchanger in April.
And video advertising is hotter than a New York City sidewalk in July. When Mondelēz International struck its deal with TubeMogul, the focus was on video. Likewise, both Twitter and Facebook made their video plays in late June and early July, respectively, when Twitter snapped up SnappyTV and Facebook acquired video ad platform LiveRail.
And of course, one must not forget AOL’s purchase of Adap.tv last August or Comcast going in with Freewheel in March.
Acquisitions around video ad platforms have come at a ferocious pace. Yahoo, of course, doesn’t have that yet. But with Rayv, it has something its needed for a long time: the means to distribute its own video assets. A video ad platform would seem to be Yahoo’s next logical step, especially when one looks at all of its competitors with both video distribution and ad-serving tools.
