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Clearleap buy ushers IBM’s entry into video

Big Blue may have made a canny acquisition

Big Blue is splashing more cash on beefing up its cloud-based offerings, last week acquiring Clearleap along with its video platform for an unspecified amount.

Clearleap counts HBO, TWC, Verizon and BBC America among its customer list, and provides video services that deliver content to multiscreen devices, as well as an open API framework for app building and workflow management, and the subscription and monetization services that accompany these OTT assets.

Clearleap gives IBM a full stack of OTT software, which it can then use to challenge Cisco, Alcatel (now Nokia), and Ericsson, as well as construct new services from the myriad of component pieces it now owns. Suddenly, IBM finds itself firmly in the video game, with a very big hand to play or bundle – depending on your level of confidence in Big Blue.

In terms of this “tipping point,” IBM has largely ignored the video market for the past decade, although it has been heavily involved in the customer management systems that OTT platforms have been forced in recent years to become familiar with. IBM also has a strong focus on business applications, and its traditional strengths lie in providing servers and computational power in order to host or execute these applications – often on behalf of the end-customer.

IBM says that it will host Clearleap’s services inside its own global IBM Cloud data centres, using its considerable experience in compute and storage. In addition, the video files it is bringing on board with the Clearleap acquisition could be encapsulated by IBM’s other recent purchase – CleverSafe, a cloud storage firm that specialises in object-based storage, which is the kind of storage that allows companies to store unstructured data like videos and photos more efficiently.

That move is also bolstered by IBM’s ownership of Aspera, which it acquired in 2014. The company specializes in speeding up large file transfers, like video, over broadband networks, using its patented FASP transport protocol. The Aspera system can be used for traditional transport workloads, but is also used for distribution, collaboration, and automation tasks.

IBM will also be incorporating Clearleap into its Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which will then allow customers to create applications using components of the Clearleap platform in a similar manner to how Bluemix allows users to integrate its Watson AI into apps to spot patterns in images or datasets.

In the future, those Bluemix components are likely to expand to include the non-video business functions like CRM, user credential management, and billing – and IBM can access an awful lot of cash to spend on acquisitions that would flesh out its offerings in these areas.

Clearleap, based in the US state of Georgia, has raised some $45 million in investment over its seven-year history. With data centres in the US, Germany, and the Netherlands. Its platform ingests live feeds and VoD files, which are then fed through a configurable automated workflow that can encode and package the video based on the multiplatform devices it will be watched on.

After that, the platform allows auto-publishing, geographic and licence rule enforcement, promotional trials, user management, subscriber data, personalization, and content discovery – before pushing it through device APIs to the end-device or into the hands of a distributor. From the outside, it looks like a pretty comprehensive platform.

IBM makes its money from the internet, and given that it predicts upwards of 65% of all web traffic will consist of video in the near future, it wants to ensure that it is in the best position to take advantage of this evolution. With a modular PaaS, IBM is able to sell to customers who deal primarily in video (such as Clearleap’s existing portfolio), or to those with a partial or tangential interest, such as businesses looking to serve training videos to staff, or promotional video for consumers.

“Clearleap joins IBM at a tipping point in the industry when visual information and visual communication are not just important to consumers, but are exploding across every industry," said Robert LeBlanc, SVP IBM Cloud. "This comes together for a client when any content can be delivered quickly and economically to any device in the most natural way."

Copyright © 2015, Faultline

Faultline is published by Rethink Research, a London-based publishing and consulting firm. This weekly newsletter is an assessment of the impact of the week's events in the world of digital media. Faultline is where media meets technology. Subscription details here.

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