Type of business Subsidiary of Telstra Employees 450 Founded 2007 | Industry Internet video Website www.ooyala.com Parent organization Telstra | |
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No. of locations Santa Clara, New York, Los Angeles, Dallas ,London, Sydney, Guadalajara, Stockholm, Singapore, Chennai and Tokyo Key people Issac Vaughn
(Acting CEO) CEO Ramesh Srinivasan (1 Jan 2016–) Founders Bismarck Lepe, Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe Profiles | ||
Why did telstra spend usd270m on ooyala
Ooyala (pronounced /uːˈjɑːlə/ "oo-YAH-la") is a venture-backed, privately held company that provides online video technology products and services. The company was founded in 2007 by brothers Bismarck Lepe and Belsasar Lepe, and their colleague and friend from Google, Sean Knapp. The word ooyala means 'cradle' or 'swing' in Kannada or Telugu (ఊయల).
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As of 2009, Ooyala was providing video technology and services for over 500 companies. The company has over 450 employees, and offices in Santa Clara, California; New York; Los Angeles; London; Sydney; Guadalajara; and Tokyo.
History
In January 2007, Bismarck Lepe was working for Google. While developing new monetization techniques for YouTube, he came up with the idea of using computer vision techniques to deliver targeted advertising on TV shows recorded on TiVo. He contacted his brother Belasar and a friend, Sean Knapp, to discuss his idea.
The company was initially focused on applying computer vision techniques to create clickable video. As the company grew, it expanded its scope to develop technologies that improve the quality and speed at which online video is delivered, and allow Web publishers to measure, monetize and optimize their video content.
In its first round of funding, Ooyala raised money from a number of angel investors and businesspeople, including Scott Flanders, CEO of Playboy Enterprises; Tim Koogle, Former CEO of Yahoo!; and Oliver Grace, Kip Hagopian, Fred Warren, and Ron Conway. Eight months later, Ooyala raised an additional $8.5 million from Sierra Ventures. Two more successful rounds of fund-raising followed, through 2011. Through September 2010, Ooyala had raised $42 million from Sage Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, Rembrandt Ventures, CID Group (a Shanghai-based private equity fund), Hitochu and Panasonic.
The company has grown from a single-office startup to one with eight offices, 450 employees and customers in over 20 countries. More than half of Ooyala's business now comes from international markets.
Jay Fulcher, formerly of Agile, PeopleSoft, and SAP, joined Ooyala as the company’s CEO in August 2009.
Products
Ooyala's main offering is a platform that enables Web sites to publish, manage, monetize, and analyze online video content. It is built to be modular and provides real-time analysis capability to its customers.
In 2010, the company deployed one of the first large-scale Cassandra clusters for its analytics and video transcoding services.
Partners
The service is used by the Times of India, Disney, News Corp, and the Telegraph Media Group.
In February 2011, Ooyala announced a multi-year partnership with Yahoo! Japan.
In June, 2012, Telstra led a $35 million (USD) round of financing in Ooyala, and announced plans to use Ooyala’s software and services to deliver its television content online and, further, to resell it to other media companies and corporations. On 1 October 2014 Telstra announced that it had acquired Ooyala.
Ooyala works with a number of partners, including Adobe, Microsoft, NTT, YuMe, Tremor Media, Akamai, Level3, PayWizard and Google.