Looking to speed up its online video strategy, Yahoo on Friday said it has acquired RayV, an Israel-based company focused on the mobile sector.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the deal comes as Yahoo tries to focus on growing video users and monthly streams, P.P.S. Narayan, Yahoo’s VP of cloud platforms and services, said in a blog post announcing the deal.
While Yahoo is just “getting started” on the video front, “[t]his deal demonstrates our dedication to accelerating our video strategy and boosting our underlying technology infrastructure in the space,” he added.
RayV, founded in 2006, offers a platform designed to deliver high quality streaming for its online and mobile content partners. Company co-founders Omer Luzzatti, RayV’s CTO, and Ofer Shem-Tov, its chief architect, are among those joining Yahoo, and will be based at its R&D center in Tel Aviv, Narayan said.
“We believe Yahoo will be a perfect fit for our people and capabilities, as Video and Mobile offerings are a central part of Yahoo’s vision,” RayV said. “Yahoo’s global scale and broad content base, combined with its amazing leadership and appetite for success, creates an ideal environment for our team to thrive and be pushed to the next level.”
The Wall Street Journalreported in May that Yahoo was in talks to buy RayV, noting that Yahoo, which was among those interested in buying Hulu last year, would look for the acquisition to help it flesh out the technical underpinnings required for an online video offering and put Yahoo in a better position to compete with Google’s YouTube.
