Yahoo acquires maven, video syndie and ad firm

With the $160 1000000 transaction, the firm also hopes to support its considerable video licensing agreements and good compete with dominant video participant Google-owned YouTube and Brightcove for video syndication contracts.

Cambridge University, Mass.-based Maven's video participant and ad platform is now used by 30 media companies, including Fox News, CBS athletics and the Financial Times, along with their affiliates. It also has a human relationship with William Randolph Hearst, a member of Yahoo's long-discussed paper consortium. Yahoo plans to offer the engineering to the paper group as well as to other off-site ad spouse like Comcast, eBay and Forbes.com.

Other plans for Maven's video platform include boosting its ad capabilities, first introduced in Oct with sheathing ads and "telescoping," which enables interactive ad component.

Maven was founded in 2002 with a very different business model, offer a desktop media participant with insurance premium sponsorships attached to characteristic films and other high quality video downloads. More late it re-focused its development and sales resources on video syndication.

By elevation Yahoo's profile in a hot industry sector, the Maven dealing may also help Yahoo in its electric current face-off with Microsoft, whose unsolicited acquisition bid Yahoo rejected yesterday. In its missive to Microsoft, Yahoo stated the $44.6 one million million offer "well undervalues Yahoo."

Yahoo's deal with Maven was first reported by TechCrunch last month.