Does Google's Episodic acquisition change the game at all?
Last Friday, ZDNet's Sam Diaz reported on Google's acquisition of a key Brightcove competitor, Episodic. Brightcove made headlines last week by claiming that it was developing tools that could port its video content to either Flash or HTML 5, making the lack of Flash support on the iPad irrelevant.
However, while Brightcove calls itself "the leading online video platform," Episodic calls itself "the most complete online video platform." As PCWorld describes it,
Episodic is an online video hosting service and publishing suite, and features the capability to publish live streams and on-demand content. Users also have control over advertisements and ad breaks in their videos, as well as an in-depth analytics tool that gives them real-time information on viewers' experiences.
Seen in that context, while there are some minor redundancies with YouTube, overall, Episodic is the perfect complement to Google's own online video repository. With Episodic technologies built in, YouTube suddenly becomes not only a content archive, but a broadcast, on-demand, streaming, medium with a large developer base and quite a few content partners (Showtime, for example). Episodic allows not only live broadcasts over the web, but supports content creation for all major mobile devices and monetization of live media, among other powerful features.
Episodic founder and CEO, Noam Lovinsky, gave a great overview of Episodic late last year in the video below. Notice the Apple reference near the end; if being acquired by Google was on his mind, he has one heck of a poker face.
Quite a few questions remain unanswered by either company's blog posts, though. Episodic has not been free for some time. How will the paid services be integrated into YouTube? How will major content partners respond? How much will the Episodic technologies simply be built into the YouTube platform and how much will Episodic continue to stand alone? And just how will this get Google's content onto the iPad?