Microsoft Acquires Israeli-Founded Video Tech Firm Peer5 To Enhance Live Video

Microsoft announced this week that it acquired Peer5, an Israeli-founded company that delivers Enterprise Content Delivery Networks (eCDN) solutions to content providers. The company’s platform helps optimize bandwidth usage via mesh networking technology, delivering video streams faster and at a lower cost.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Microsoft said it will use Peer5’s tech to enhance live video network performance in Microsoft Teams.

Founded in 2012, Peer5 offers an eCDN solution based on WebRTC, an open-sourced project released by Google, which allows computer browsers to connect and interact in real-time without any additional software and transfer data using p2p systems. The company’s mesh networks are self-balancing and automatically scale as the number of viewers increase. The technology does not require additional installation on user endpoints or changes to the physical network infrastructure.

“As live streaming becomes more common in the workplace; large organizations need reliable enterprise video streaming solutions. Enterprise Content Delivery Networks (eCDN) can alleviate limited corporate network downlink bandwidth to deliver high-quality video streaming and broadcasting for large audiences of employees,” wrote Nicole Herskowitz, general manager at Microsoft Teams in a post announcing the acquisition.

“Together with Peer5, we’re thrilled to advance our commitment for building a better hybrid workplace for a new era of communications,” she indicated.

Hadar Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Peer5, said in a blog post that since the company’s establishment almost a decade ago, the founders had a vision to “decentralize the web and video streaming with WebRTC.”

In the years since, Weiss said Peer5 has powered large live events with up to as many as 2 million concurrent users. ts product has been used by more than a billion users over the past nine years.

“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft and enable our eCDN solution for their many enterprise customers with a single mouse-click. We’re eagerly looking forward to enabling live streaming for many more organizations around the world!” wrote Weiss.