Episodic acquisition adds more bang for YouTube's buck

Google's announcement Friday that it had acquired online video platform Episodic gives it added analytic tools, some added cred in the premium online video market in the form of Episodic customer Showtime, for example, and helps supply some depth to the gigantic, but somewhat vanilla YouTube, potentially elevating it to the level of an OVP with a more complete suite of tools at its disposal. Terms of the deal were not revealed.

Episodic lets publishers and marketers host, stream, measure and monetize online video content. Content creators, marketers and enterprise customers use Episodic to deliver video to the Web and mobile devices.

Episodic founders Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich said on the company's blog Friday that current customers would see no interruption in service, but added that the company would not be adding new customers for the moment. Episodic employees will begin working with Google today.

The San Francisco-based, privately held company is the fifth pickup for the search giant this year; it previously acquired DocVerse, Picnik, Aardvark and ReMail. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the company was looking to acquire about one company a month in 2010 with the $22 billion in had in cash reserves.

For more:
- see this blog post from Episodic
- see this MediaPost story

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