Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Conviva Raises $15 Million for Advanced Streaming Technology

Conviva, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, raises $15 million in Series C round of funding to accelerate its advanced streaming business. The company has optimized over a billion video streams for some of the largest broadcasters on the Internet and will use the new financing to expand the company's global footprint.


Conviva provides real-time visibility into each viewer's video session as well as the entire online video ecosystem to predict when an interruption is about to occur and, in advance, uses its proprietary switching technology to prevent an issue from reaching the viewer.


To sustain high-quality viewing, Conviva adds control intelligence to adaptive bit rate delivery and performs stream switching across multiple delivery networks.


During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Conviva managed more than 200 million streams, reached more than 30 million unique viewers and handled three billion viewer minutes worldwide.


The new funding brings Conviva's total amount raised to $44 million since its launch in 2006. GGV Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Pelion Venture Partners (formerly UV Partners).
http://www.conviva.com

  • Conviva is headed by Darren Feher, president and chief executive officer, who joined Conviva in October 2009 from NBC Universal, where he last served as executive vice president and chief technology officer.


  • Conviva was co-founder by Dr. Hui Zhang and Dr. Ion Stoica. As a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Dr. Zhang has established himself as one of the world’s leading authorities on Internet Quality of Service (QoS), video streaming, network control, and Internet architecture. Dr. Zhang is credited with teaching and mentoring many computer network researchers who are now in industry (Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft) and academia (University of California, Berkeley, Rice, Purdue). In particular, he supervised Ion Stoica’s 2001 award-winning Ph.D. dissertation on Internet QoS.