Our Investment in Bitmovin: working to build the web’s new video infrastructure
Online video content has exploded over the last few years, and consumers have come to expect high-quality video anywhere, and on any device. As we go forward, this presents a huge technical challenge. It’s the web’s next big problem, but it’s also a huge market opportunity: the time spent watching online video is still less than 20% of linear TV programming. As the viewing habits of millennials become the norm, and new technology like VR and 360 degree video comes to fruition, the web will need to adapt.
Bitmovin is the company that will solve this problem. Founded by the co-creators of MPEG-DASH, the video streaming standard used by industry leaders like Netflix and YouTube, Bitmovin are working to lay the groundwork for a future dominated by video content. They provide best-in-class infrastructure for developers, making video easier to use with their easy to integrate API. Their high performance HTML5 player is capable of streaming high quality video across any platform, including virtual reality- a hugely exciting area that they’re keen to expand into. The company also has a market-leading cloud encoding service, a vital offer as content owners and creators change the way in which they manage video. Online video is at an inflection point, and we believe Bitmovin can play a central role in this transition. As the web becomes more reliant on video, more and more developers will turn to Bitmovin’s straightforward yet sophisticated API.
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve led Bitmovin’s $10.3 million Series A round, supported by Speedinvest and Dawn Capital. We’re proud to invest in a company backed by a range of pioneers in video who share our conviction. These include David Helgason, founder of Unity, Chris Kaiser, former VP of engineering at Netflix and YouTube, and Edward Cozel, former CTO of Cisco. Like us, they see the huge market opportunity that video infrastructure presents. They also know there’s nobody better than Bitmovin to take advantage of it. We’re looking forward to working alongside the Bitmovin team and our co-investors as the company paves the way for this future dominated by video content. Bitmovin is part of an exciting new breed of European companies with deep technology innovation at its core. We expect great things from them.
