San Francisco based multimedia technology company and one of our portfolio startups, Bitmovin has just raised $25M in Series C round. The funding round was led by the Switzerland based VC, Swisscom Ventures in participation with Climb Ventures, Atomico, Highland Europe and Constantia New Business.
The latest funding round has raised Bitmovin’s total funding amount to $87.3M according to Crunchbase. Let’s have a quick review of Bitmovin’s funding history:
- 2015 – Seed round
- 2016 – Series A – $10.3M
- 2018 – Series B – $30M
- Now – Series C – $25M
Bitmovin offers video infrastructure solutions for adaptive streaming so it’s important to first understand that what is adaptive streaming itself?
We watch online videos from different websites on different devices. Those videos are streamed in two ways:
- Progressive Streaming where same video file is streamed to all users on different devices. This technique is old and has some issues. For example, each device might have different resolution and users might also be having different speeds of internet connections so if a large video is being streamed, it cannot play smooth (without buffering and lags) on devices with low speed internet connections. Similarly, if a small video file is being streamed, it would be pixelated on devices with large screens and higher resolutions.
- Adaptive Streaming solves the issues with progressive streaming. In this approach, different video files are generated and streamed according to devices and different internet speeds of the users. This way, for users with low internet speed, smaller video files are streamed for running smoothly without lag and for devices with bigger resolutions or high internet speed connections, bigger and high quality video files are streamed that can give best user experience.
Bitmovin offers containerized encoding solution that can be easily deployed on popular public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and Enterprises can use Bitmovin encoder through its APIs and SDKs for adaptive streaming of their videos. All popular codecs including AV1, VP9, H.264, HEVC, VVC, MKV, WebM, MPEG-DASH and HLS are supported by Bitmovin.
Bitmovin also offers a superior quality player that supports adaptive streaming and runs video smoothly on all popular clients with lowest buffering. You may also get the actionable data from video players using video analytics service provided by Bitmovin.
Bitmovin powers online video providers including Discovery Plus, FuboTV, DAZN, BBC, RTL, RedBull Media House, Globo, Cand The New York Times. The company, which has over 400 global clients, is the platform that provides the instantaneous video from any device.
Bitmovin CEO and founder at Stefan Lederer said that the company will use the new funds to address three main technology areas—encoding , universal player support and viewer-behavior analytics.
“We will continue to optimize compression technologies and bandwidth for premium VOD encoding, such as premium cinema content, as well as increasing routes to monetization for live video services.”
“First, we will extend our capabilities for device testing through the addition of long-running automated tests (four-plus hours) and a framework for embracing customer streams into our testing environment,” Lederer said in an email. “Second, we will expand our advertising capabilities through the integration of advertising frameworks, such as the Roku Advertising Framework (RAF) and client-side ad capabilities on tvOS. Third, we will launch the next major version of our mobile SDKs (version 3), which will enhance the developer experience and support for the latest mobile technologies on both iOS and Android.”
Bitmovin saw 174% growth in the number of broadcasting clients opting for OTT over 2020. Due in part to the pandemic, the company experienced a 118% increase in video play with 220% more minutes watched, and a 380% growth in network traffic of video on the internet. This significant increase in demand for high quality video and large resolution video on big screens—smart TVs, game consoles, Apple TV, Roku—put a burden on internet service providers, which Bitmovin says resulted in a 15% slowdown on the average bandwidth available to viewers.
“As a direct result of Bitmovin’s investment in advancing these areas, the company has enabled tier-one media companies to reclaim upwards of 60% of their streaming bandwidth,” Lederer said. He would not name the tier-one media outlets that reclaimed streaming bandwidth.
Please read full story at Next TV.