VBrick Systems, a Wallingford, CT-based provider of technology for the live streaming of video content online, is expanding its footprint in New England. The company, founded in 1998, is adding an office in Boston, where it hopes to have 10 employees by the end of the quarter and 20 employees by the end of the year, says chief operating officer John Shaw.
“The Boston market is obviously one of the epicenters of high technology in the United states,” he says. “Our major motivation is to tap into the talent pool here.”
VBrick, which will keep its roughly 125-employee office in Connecticut as well, started out offering a platform for broadcasting online video to hundreds or thousands of recipients at a time. The technology converts and compresses video files for the Web, integrates other content like PowerPoint slides, distributes the video over IP networks, and adjusts the content for viewing on different devices. The company’s main focus was to deliver content, such as executive broadcasts, within company networks; it has since accrued more than 9,000 customers, including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies and every branch of the U.S. military. U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan use the technology to communicate with embassies and the like, and also to keep up to date on TV shows.
There are plenty of technologies focused on broadcasting video to internal networks and wide open audiences—VBrick has a software-as-a-service product called VBoss for the latter—but not much unifying both worlds, Shaw says. That’s where he’s hoping the Boston VBrick team will come in.
The big goal with the Boston office is to smooth out the process for users who do both types of broadcasting. Streaming video for a company’s employees shouldn’t look any different than does posting video marketing material on a website outside the corporate firewall, Shaw says. “The team that’s in Boston is largely responsible for bringing those things completely together,” he says.
VBrick recently acquired Emeryville, CA-based video hosting technology firm Fliqz for an undisclosed sum to focus more on the external broadcasts. And we can expect more acquisitions in the future from VBrick as it plans to expand and diversifies its technology for streaming online video. “Definitely part of the strategy is to take advantage of some good products and talent developed in companies, and bring that into VBrick as we enlarge the offering,” Shaw says.
