Bitmovin – an online video technology service offering API-driven cloud based video encoding with in-depth analytics and HTML5 video player, has collected $30M in a Series B funding round. This round was led by Highland Europe and other investors including Atomico, Constantia New Business, Dawn Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Bitmovin went through Series A in 2016 to get $10.3M funding which was after one year when Bitmovin was added to our portfolio and as per Crunchbase, the total funding amount raised by Bitmovin till date has reached $40.3M.
The core product offered by Bitmovin is its video encoding service which can be tried for free through a cool Bitmovin Dashboard. However, on-premise encoding or encoding infrastructure service is a paid feature available only to enterprises. Bitmovin also offers a highly customizable HTML5 video player that supports DRM (Digital Rights Management) and monetizing video content by integrating advertisements. Botmovin’s last product is video analytics which provides detailed information on a variety of data metrics. Using analytics APIs, enterprises can build custom dashboards as per their own needs. Few OSS dashboards are also available which can be used by developers as a starting point for building their own ones.
The company says the new round of funding will be used to scale its product R&D, field engineering and sales teams worldwide — with the aim being to expand its global customer base of TV streaming providers, internet companies and social media companies. The Series B brings total funding for the 2013-founded company and Y Combinator alumnus to $43 million.
“Bitmovin came about as a spin-off from research we did together at the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria,” says Bitmovin CEO Stefan Lederer, who founded the company with CTO Christopher Müller. “During our PhDs we co-created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, which is used by YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc. amongst many others today, and which is used in total for more than 50% of the peak internet traffic. The research evolved into the company, with the help of angel investors including senior people at Cisco, Netflix, Accenture, Drupal and DropBox”.
“We are different from the existing vendors as we are deeply developer and API focussed, with a passion for innovation and disruptive technologies. That’s our background, we are engineers, and we like to build the best products. Thus we’ve been the first ones in many new technologies on the market, setting the bar on performance and efficiency of video streaming”.
On the technology side, recent Bitmovin announcements include the ability to use AI to encode videos more effectively (learning, scene-by-scene how each video is treated so the next one is handled more quickly) and a new video player that can reduce the load time on a typical HTML page by a second.
“We’re also proud to support a new royalty-free codec called AV1, which came out last week (backed by Apple, Bitmovin, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, amongst others). It shifts the tectonic plates in video because it’s the first time that online video innovation will be possible without making payments to a pool of incumbent, traditional media and consumer electronics companies. It helps opens the playing field to internet companies to, potentially, take more of the lead in video entertainment. It also means more predictability as companies will not be affected by changes in patent pools,” says Lederer.
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