Facebook Acquires QuickFire Networks to Better Support Video

Facebook is proving once again that it isn’t messing around when it comes to video.

The company announced the acquisition of QuickFire Networks on Thursday, a video startup with technology that aims to support high-quality video files without using a ton of bandwidth. In other words: Facebook needs technology to ensure the video quality on its social network isn’t going to decrease as more and more people watch and share video content; QuickFire should be able to help.

News of the acquisition comes just one day after Facebook released new data about the popularity of video on the platform. Users watch more than one billion video clips on Facebook each day, and more than half of the daily U.S. Facebook users are watching at least one video per day. In the past year, video posts per user are up 75 percent around the world.

Part of that is due to Facebook’s strategy to promote video, and the introduction of autoplay video. When you upload a video directly to Facebook, it autoplays in News Feed. And a tweak to the algorithm means that the more video you watch, the more video Facebook will show you (it’s easy to watch lots of video when it’s playing automatically).

The QuickFire technology may also help Facebook surface high-quality video to users in emerging markets where Wi-Fi and cellular data access are hard to come by. Creating a better experience in those markets (think South America and Africa) should help boost user numbers as more people join the service despite limited connectivity.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to share terms of the deal, but select employees from QuickFire will join Facebook at the company’s Seattle and Menlo Park, Calif., offices.

The QuickFire acquisition is Facebook’s second this week. On Monday, Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a Palo Alto-based voice recognition startup.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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