Box Acquiring Streem (YC S12)

ritikm 12 years ago |

(Streem co-founder here) Small clerical error - we were actually YC S12, not W14 :).

MIT_Hacker 12 years ago | |

Ahhh!!! Congrats Ritik. Huge news and always nice to see good news from other Thiel Fellows :)

Really hope Streem continues to exist as an independent product or at least as a plugin on top of Box or something.

Good luck man!

natural219 12 years ago | |

Congrats man. I remember meeting you at the Meteor meetup and was thrilled with your vision (plus the balls to go with Meteor!). Good luck with your endeavors.

jsun 12 years ago | |

hey we've been looking for this EXACT solution for ages and had no idea you guys existed...

Is Streem going to continue to live on as a separate product?

avelis 12 years ago | |

As someone who signed up on the waiting list but haven't received an invite. Will I have a chance to experience your product at all?

nwenzel 12 years ago | |

Congrats Ritik! Box adding a streaming content provider opens up a new world for them. Great choice on their part.

nicklovescode 12 years ago | |

Wohoooo Congrats!

zan2434 12 years ago | |

congrats Ritik! Proud of ya

cktsai 12 years ago | |

congrats guys!

windsurfer 12 years ago |

Another "our incredible journey":

> we want to thank our beta testers for their helpful feedback, our amazing investors for believing in us from the start, and our friends and family for supporting us through the ride.

ritikm 12 years ago | |

We really wanted to make the list :)

rdl 12 years ago | | |

Do you have to include the literal phrase "our incredible journey" in the acquisition or shutdown announcement to be eligible?

tnorthcutt 12 years ago |

And to further optimize the experience and support low-bandwidth environments, Streem has developed enhanced video and media streaming technology to ensure content is accessible from the cloud as fast as it is locally.

How is this technically possible?

adamors 12 years ago | |

They've developed a new compression algorithm with a Weissman score of 5.2.

jayzalowitz 12 years ago | | |

So the purchase price was above 10m? They turned that down when salesforce offered..

GarrettBeck 12 years ago | | |

+1

ritikm 12 years ago | |

We built an on-demand adaptive bitrate video transcoder that works with HLS. So it's able to fluctuate the quality and size of the video being streamed server-side before sending it down to the client. In a low-bandwidth environment, the quality decreases automatically so that the video streams without any lag. It's similar to how Netflix does their streaming.

silverbax88 12 years ago | | |

How is this different than adaptive streaming?

manishsharan 12 years ago | | |

If you are using FFMPEG for this, would you care to share your hack ?

hack_edu 12 years ago | | |

One hopes Box didn't acquire a company with only a beta-invite product for simply their ffmpeg one-liners...

livejamie 12 years ago |

Did anybody else read "Box Acquiring Steam" at first?

kevin818 12 years ago | |

Yes, but then I realized that wouldn't make much sense so I forced myself to read each letter :)

rdl 12 years ago |

Wow, congratulations. It's interesting that what seems to be a more video/etc. content focused company is going to Box -- is Box trying to beef up their consumer/content-professional market?

BorisMelnik 12 years ago |

Smart acquisition! I didn't know about Streem, wow what a great idea. The one thing always holding me back from day to day usage of Dropbox / Box etc is being able to mount these drives in Windows. I would definitely sign up / pay for an account now.

icebraining 12 years ago | |

You've been able to mount Box drives on Windows since at least 2006. They support Webdav, which Windows XP and above can mount natively.

hatred 12 years ago |

Can Ritik comment on some insights into how StreemFS looks like ? Does it follow a nfs client-server model where the server then makes a request to the Streem servers to get back the data and also managing look ahead buffers etc ?

tootie 12 years ago |

That is some interesting stuff. I had to shut off Dropbox sync when it literally filled my hard drive. It sounds like Steem just caches virtual files that link to remote data. I'm curious to see it in action.

dtfiw 12 years ago |

Congrats! I just hope the acquisition was all cash, and not for stock.

sid_xervmon 12 years ago |

Congrats to founders and whole team. This is just awesome.

natural219 12 years ago |

Now let's see something like this but with an open source protocol like Camlistore.

Still looking for a co-founder to tear this industry apart. Email's in profile.

sajithw 12 years ago |

Congrats, ritik!

magic5227 12 years ago |

Great purchase, could add a lot of value to their consumer offering.

cstigler 12 years ago |

Wooooooo Streem!

fuire8 12 years ago |

no wonder why they had to pull IPO.