Box Acquiring Streem (YC S12) | Hacker News Reader

Box Acquiring Streem (YC S12)

blog.box.com

98 pointsgoronbjorn34 comments

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(Streem co-founder here) Small clerical error - we were actually YC S12, not W14 :).

Congrats Ritik! Box adding a streaming content provider opens up a new world for them. Great choice on their part.

hey we've been looking for this EXACT solution for ages and had no idea you guys existed...

Is Streem going to continue to live on as a separate product?

Ahhh!!! Congrats Ritik. Huge news and always nice to see good news from other Thiel Fellows :)

Really hope Streem continues to exist as an independent product or at least as a plugin on top of Box or something.

Good luck man!

Congrats man. I remember meeting you at the Meteor meetup and was thrilled with your vision (plus the balls to go with Meteor!). Good luck with your endeavors.

Wohoooo Congrats!

As someone who signed up on the waiting list but haven't received an invite. Will I have a chance to experience your product at all?

congrats guys!

congrats Ritik! Proud of ya

Another "our incredible journey":

> we want to thank our beta testers for their helpful feedback, our amazing investors for believing in us from the start, and our friends and family for supporting us through the ride.

We really wanted to make the list :)

Do you have to include the literal phrase "our incredible journey" in the acquisition or shutdown announcement to be eligible?

And to further optimize the experience and support low-bandwidth environments, Streem has developed enhanced video and media streaming technology to ensure content is accessible from the cloud as fast as it is locally.

How is this technically possible?

They've developed a new compression algorithm with a Weissman score of 5.2.

So the purchase price was above 10m? They turned that down when salesforce offered..

We built an on-demand adaptive bitrate video transcoder that works with HLS. So it's able to fluctuate the quality and size of the video being streamed server-side before sending it down to the client. In a low-bandwidth environment, the quality decreases automatically so that the video streams without any lag. It's similar to how Netflix does their streaming.

If you are using FFMPEG for this, would you care to share your hack ?

One hopes Box didn't acquire a company with only a beta-invite product for simply their ffmpeg one-liners...

How is this different than adaptive streaming?

Did anybody else read "Box Acquiring Steam" at first?

Yes, but then I realized that wouldn't make much sense so I forced myself to read each letter :)

Wow, congratulations. It's interesting that what seems to be a more video/etc. content focused company is going to Box -- is Box trying to beef up their consumer/content-professional market?

Smart acquisition! I didn't know about Streem, wow what a great idea. The one thing always holding me back from day to day usage of Dropbox / Box etc is being able to mount these drives in Windows. I would definitely sign up / pay for an account now.

You've been able to mount Box drives on Windows since at least 2006. They support Webdav, which Windows XP and above can mount natively.

Can Ritik comment on some insights into how StreemFS looks like ? Does it follow a nfs client-server model where the server then makes a request to the Streem servers to get back the data and also managing look ahead buffers etc ?

That is some interesting stuff. I had to shut off Dropbox sync when it literally filled my hard drive. It sounds like Steem just caches virtual files that link to remote data. I'm curious to see it in action.

Congrats! I just hope the acquisition was all cash, and not for stock.

Congrats to founders and whole team. This is just awesome.

Now let's see something like this but with an open source protocol like Camlistore.

Still looking for a co-founder to tear this industry apart. Email's in profile.

Congrats, ritik!

Great purchase, could add a lot of value to their consumer offering.

Wooooooo Streem!

no wonder why they had to pull IPO.

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