FollowAccording to a blog post signed by Google’s product manager Belwadi Srikanth, Google acquired Zync Render. The sum paid by Google was not disclosed. Zync, founded in 2011, is a visual effects cloud rendering company.
Since its inception, Zync offered services for film producers. “Star Trek Into Darkness”, “Looper”, “American Hustle” and “Transformers” are among the productions that used these specialized services. Zync distinguishes itself by making all the video processing in the cloud. Most importantly, this characteristic makes the production process more cost efficient.
The company offered services for more than a dozen feature films. More than 6.5 million hours of videos have been passed through Zync’s cloud. The impressive number includes hundreds of commercials, according to the company’s website. Zync offers flexibility to large-scale video projects. The characteristic is important as it often turns out that artistic projects are difficult to place in a tight time frame.
Google acquired Zync after Amazon bought Twitch
Although novel, in cloud video rendering is not unique. PC World mentions that Amazon Web Services can potentially offer similar assistance, even if the service is more generally oriented. Amazon’s product is called G2 Elastic Cloud Compute. Amazon even stepped up its game by acquiring the video games streaming site Twitch for $1 billion. Gamers are an important target for every company as they are mostly young males. GameStop increased its profit in the second quarter as gaming consoles exceeded the most optimistic forecasts.
Google’s move is consistent as YouTube has announced new video tools for producers in June. From now on, YouTube broadcasters can upload videos at 48 or even 60 fps. In August, YouTube acquired Directr, a startup offering video production services for people filming on mobile devices. Directr offered guidance along the process, but services came at a cost. After YouTube bought Directr, the services will be offered for free. So now that Google acquired Zync, it may want to transfer the know-how and people from Zync to Youtube, as the largest streaming service becomes more complex. Google will probably use per-minute billing for their future clients demanding in-cloud visual effects.
“Together Zync + Cloud Platform will offer studios the rendering performance and capacity they need, while helping them manage costs. For example, with per-minute billing studios aren’t trapped into paying for unused capacity when their rendering needs don’t fit in perfect hour increments,” Google’s blogpost states.
