YouTube, which is in the midst of a hiring spree to fuel its video platform expansion, purchased Green Parrot Pictures to boost its video processing capabilities on 15 March.
Google’s video-sharing website receives a lot of video each day – 35 hours uploaded per minute – ranging from professional quality to really poor quality clips from amateurs using cheap video cameras and mobile phones.
The Catch-22 is that some of the more popular videos are created in the latter category. These clips are shaky, blurry and just really poor quality.
Jeremy Doig, director for Google Video Technology, cited videos of recent protests in Libya. While these proved to be popular content for users, which Google craves because it keeps users returning to the site, the quality may be off-putting to some users.
Green Parrot has built video processing software that can clean up images, making them crisper and more steady as content makers upload the video to YouTube. The technology also uses less bandwidth and improves playback speed.
The startup was created six years ago by associate professor Anil Kokaram at the Engineering School of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
Doig said Green Parrot’s software has been used by blockbusters productions such as the “Lord of the Rings”, “X-Men” and “Spider-Man”.
That Green Parrot’s technology has been used in feature films is a testament to Google’s interest in polishing YouTube content, once a playground for simple, wacky videos of people goofing off or showing off.
Yet YouTube has shown bigger ambition of late. The company, which is boosting its staff by 30 percent this year, runs Google TV, the search engine’s web TV unit.
YouTube acquired Next New Networks to fortify video production for professionals and is testing in-stream video ads using DoubleClick’s real-time bidding technology.
The site also aired its first feature film on 11 March, seemingly eyeing the turf of Netflix and Amazon.com’s streaming video services.
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