IBM has made another acquisition in the streaming video realm, scooping up Ustream for a reported $130 million. The deal comes a bit over a month after IBM bought Clearleap for its large-scale video content management and delivery platform. Ustream focuses on live-streaming video, versus on-demand content, as IBM's announcement notes:

Ustream provides cloud-based video streaming to enterprises and broadcasters for everything from corporate keynotes to live music concerts. The company streams live and on-demand video to about 80 million viewers per month for customers such as NASA, Samsung, Facebook, Nike and The Discovery Channel.

At the heart of the Ustream portfolio is the open Ustream Development Platform which enables clients to create custom video apps to run video on any device and embed video into any application, securely and reliably. Clients can use the company’s real-time social sentiment analytics to gauge audience reactions to the live streaming content. IBM will integrate Ustream's development platform into Bluemix to allow clients to provide distinct video services to developers.

In addition, the Ustream portfolio comprises several video solutions, including Ustream Demand, which enables marketers to collect and automate leads into marketing workflows and manage live and on-demand videos from a single dashboard.

Ustream's capabilities will be rolled into IBM's Cloud Video Services unit along with Clearleap. The unit will also create products and services that leverage other IBM assets, such as Aspera for file transferring and CleverSafe for storage. At the time of the Clearleap acquisition, IBM said it saw video as a $105 billion market between video platforms and storage spending. 

Why Ustream? It's the Analytics

While Ustream gives IBM a widely-used, mature platform for live-streaming video, the analytics capabilities noted in IBM's announcement are a key factor in the acquisition, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. 

"This isn’t just deepening IBM’s move into managing streaming digital assets and, specifically, video, it’s a complement to the company’s goal to provide comprehensive analytic services," he says. "Video is of growing importance across industries and channels of communications and commerce. Video analytics, therefore, will be crucial to quickly gaining insight from that content."

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